Annika Kappenstein

Eva F, Eva M, evaf.app

The EVA (short for Exceptional Voice App) development began as a design problem: could a structured, self-guided, visually mediated learning system provide effective voice training for transgender people who could not access or afford one-on-one speech therapy? As co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of VoxPop, LLC, I led user experience and product design for the resulting platform from its founding in 2013 through its dissolution a decade later.

The platform I designed operated as a layered learning system. Each Program — EvaF for voice feminization, EvaM for masculinization — contained Courses of ten to twenty Lessons, each structured around three instructional videos and real-time scored exercises providing immediate visual feedback on voice parameters including pitch, breath, and resonance. A companion web-based subscription platform, evaf.app, extended the offering with additional content, a community layer, and live interactive webinars. At their peak, the apps reached 17,000 active users in more than 34 countries, averaging approximately 40 downloads per day, with coverage in the Smithsonian, The Guardian, VICE, National Public Radio, and BuzzFeed, among others. Through mid-2022, I produced and edited all video content for both the mobile apps and the web platform, then hired and trained a video contractor to take on that role.

Resonance Analyzer

Beginning in 2020, I directed the development of two new features. The first was a refinement to the existing Pitch Tracker tool: I designed the UI for a “Pin High/Low Frequencies” function that allowed users to mark their personal pitch range endpoints and track progress over time — a functionally specific addition that gave users a persistent visual record of their own trajectory. The second was a Resonance Analyzer prototype: a real-time formant frequency visualizer capable of indicating whether a voice reads as masculine or feminine, grounded in peer-reviewed voice science data and developed in collaboration with voice scientist Ron Scherer, PhD, Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State University. I designed the user interface and real-time data visualization for both a standalone and an in-exercise version. The prototype was built but did not reach deployment before the company’s closure.

UGA Innovation Gateway I-Corps Accelerator Program

In Spring 2021, our company VoxPop was accepted into the UGA Innovation Gateway I-Corps Accelerator program. I served as Academic Lead alongside co-founder Kathe Perez as Entrepreneurial Lead. Over eight weeks of structured hypothesis testing, we conducted more than 100 interviews with transgender people and speech-language pathologists, refining three distinct user archetypes: people newly beginning transition, those mid-process, and those living post-transition who continued to experience voice dysphoria. The analysis confirmed that the serviceable addressable market (SAM) of $1.5 billion was too small to attract venture capital at the scale of investment the product required. I presented the VoxPop investor pitch on March 22, 2021, at the UGA Innovation Gateway before an audience of entrepreneurs and potential investors, which resulted in three ongoing business and research mentorships.

Small Business Innovation Research Grant

The central outcome of I-Corps coaching was a strategic reframe: from venture capital toward federal research funding, and from a commercial product toward a clinically validated, gamified biofeedback intervention for voice dysphoria. With support from UGA Innovation Gateway mentors, the team assembled a research group and began drafting a Small Business Innovation Research grant. I completed required CITI Program training in social/behavioral and clinical research practice, and the team submitted IRB applications to UGA (Phase I) and Sterling, a commercial IRB (Phase II). In summer 2021, we submitted a $2.25 million SBIR Fast-Track application to the NIH (PA-21-259) under the title “Eva the Voice Ninja: the voice trainer in the palm of your hand.” The NIH rejected the initial submission on a classification technicality, ruling that Phase II constituted a clinical trial. The team rewrote the proposal accordingly. A second submission was rejected in November 2022; revision based on reviewer feedback was underway in early 2023.

The third revision was never submitted. In early 2023, co-founder and co-PI Kathe Perez withdrew from the project following the Marshall Fire, a Colorado wildfire that had destroyed her home. The loss made continued collaboration untenable, and unresolved questions around intellectual property ownership made it legally impossible to proceed without her. When Perez withdrew, those unresolved questions made it impossible for me to continue alone. Several weeks later, we made the joint decision to dissolve VoxPop LLC. I spent the greater part of 2023 on the administrative work of closure: delisting Eva apps from online stores, shutting down the web-based learning platform evaf.app, closing SaaS, financial, and platform accounts across multiple services, and ensuring current users received appropriate notice and transition support. The company was dissolved at the end of 2023, ten years after its founding.

Trajectory

During the decade at the helm of VoxPop, I developed a methodology based on the agile development cycle, MVP-first thinking, and rapid prototyping practices that not only changed my design pedagogy but also became the working framework I carried into the ArchPal project. I also brought my expertise of interdisciplinary collaboration spanning design, voice science, software engineering, and clinical research; IRB protocol and human subjects training; and a decade of UX/UI development across multiple operating systems and platform generations.

But what accumulated most durably, tested against 17,000 users, was a conviction: that communities at the margins benefit most from technology that is well-designed, rigorously evidence-based, and available without financial gatekeeping. EVA provided that for voice, ArchPal extends it into writing. These two projects aren’t continuous, but they are consecutive.

• Research Proposal
• Data Visualization Pilot Workshop

Research Proposal

The Scientific Question

Aspen trees cover more of the earth’s surface than almost any other tree species, yet they cannot interbreed with their closest relatives. Cottonwoods, balsam poplars, and aspens all belong to the genus Populus and share strikingly similar genomes, but controlled crosses between aspen and these neighboring species consistently fail. The reason has been unknown for decades. Working from the haplotype-resolved aspen genome her lab produced (Zhou et al., 2023, Plant Journal, cover story) — one of the first genomic assemblies to accurately map highly repetitive sequences — Dr. Chung-Jui Tsai and her team identified a candidate explanation: roughly seven percent of the aspen genome consists of a single repeating DNA unit, called M147, organized in tandem arrays that stretch across millions of base pairs per chromosome. This sequence is absent in every other Populus section, and the single exception — a tropical aspen that lacks M147 — is also the one aspen that can occasionally hybridize across sections. A second aspen-exclusive feature, a variant of CENH3 (a protein essential to chromosome function during cell division), co-occurs with M147 in a pattern too consistent to dismiss as coincidence. The proposed NSF research pursues the hypothesis that M147 arrays and CENH3.2 interact to enforce reproductive isolation — a finding that would reframe satellite DNA as a functional actor in species-level evolution and open new possibilities for Populus breeding. The implications extend beyond trees: satellite DNA appears throughout eukaryotic genomes including human chromosomes, where its functions remain poorly understood.

Satellite DNA Art Studio

My role as co-PI centers on Activity 2 of the proposal’s Broader Impacts plan — a component I designed and titled the Satellite DNA Art Studio. The scientific premise motivating this work is not merely that genomic data is difficult for non-specialists to access, but that the dominant modes of scientific data presentation — statistical tables, sequence alignment diagrams, heat maps — are themselves an epistemological problem. They are legible only to those already trained in their conventions, which means the most consequential genomic findings of the past decade have been effectively invisible to the public whose taxes funded them.

My research question within this collaboration is design-methodological: how can the principles and tools of graphic design be applied to genomic datasets not to make them decorative, but intelligible — to translate structural complexity into visual form that communicates accurately to audiences outside the specialist community? This question sits at the intersection of communication design, data visualization, and the emerging field of science-art integration, and it is not rhetorical. Different visual representations of the same dataset produce measurably different comprehension outcomes. Making M147 visible means helping a viewer understand that seven percent of a tree’s DNA is a single repeating sequence. It’s is a design problem with real epistemic stakes.

The proposed pedagogy integrates this research question directly into the graphic design curriculum. Under my supervision, students in Graphic Systems (ARGD 3020), an upper-level course focused on visual problem-solving for complex, abstract content, would work with actual genomic datasets from the Tsai lab, developing original visualization approaches ranging from graphic simplification and information design to mixed media, three-dimensional installation, and generative AI. The student work functions not as illustration of pre-existing conclusions, but as a research catalog: multiple, competing visual translations of the same data, each representing a different design strategy, each legible (or not) to different audiences. That catalog is itself the scholarly output: a documented investigation of which visual approaches produce comprehension, and for whom.

A dedicated exhibition pipeline was designed to move the work into public space: campus galleries at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, the Georgia Museum of Art, public libraries, parks, and outdoor venues in Athens, with national exhibition as a longer-term trajectory. A public-facing website would serve as a permanent online documentation of both the science and the design process.

To develop the pilot version of this curriculum in advance of full funding, I was awarded a $1,000 mini-grant from the UGA Arts Collaborative. This grant is supporting the design of an intensive 2–3 day cross-disciplinary workshop, bringing together students from graphic design and the biological sciences to work collaboratively with satellite DNA data. The workshop is in active planning and represents the first operational phase of a curriculum that, at full scale, would run across a semester and produce a body of work for an exhibition.

Peer Review Record

The NSF proposal was reviewed by five external specialists and received a panel rating of Very Good across four of five reviews. All five reviewers addressed the Broader Impacts component explicitly; none raised criticisms. Two reviewers quoted the science-art integration as a specific strength for the Broader Impacts criteria. One wrote that “the team assembled to provide the teaching and training associated with this project in both biological sciences and the arts is compelling and likely to generate interest to students and the public.” Another called working with a graphic design specialist “a very nice touch” and noted it as a genuine opportunity for graphic design students. A third described the activities as “well-considered” and “creative,” specifically naming the inclusion of art students as a novel approach to public engagement.

The only substantive request across all reviews was the addition of audience metrics for future submissions — number of non-science majors reached, exhibition visitors, online gallery engagement. This is an addressable note that I am building into the documentation framework for the workshop and any subsequent curriculum implementation.

The scientific component was not funded due to insufficient preliminary data on the CENH3.2 hypothesis — a genetics question entirely outside my scope. My component received no criticism and the peer review record is on file.

Status and Trajectory

The grant is currently under revision. Dr. Tsai and Senior Research Associate Ran Zhou are leading the scientific revision; resubmission timeline is pending. The curriculum framework, exhibition pipeline, and pedagogy is in development and independent of the grant timeline. The pilot workshop supported by the Arts Collaborative mini-grant proceeds in parallel, generating preliminary documentation and pedagogical data that will strengthen the next submission. When the grant is resubmitted, my component will include the audience metrics requested by reviewers and the documented outcomes of the pilot workshop as evidence of feasibility.

This project represents a methodological strand that runs across my research program: the conviction that design is not downstream of knowledge production, but constitutive of it. How data is represented determines what can be seen and understood. The Satellite DNA Art Studio applies that conviction to one of the most technically inaccessible datasets in contemporary biology — and asks graphic design students to treat scientific incomprehensibility not as a limitation of the audience, but as a design problem waiting to be solved.

Data Visualization Pilot Workshop

The pilot workshop is the first operational phase of the Satellite DNA Art Studio, the Broader Impacts component of the NSF Function and Dynamics of Aspen-Specific M147 Tandem Repeat Arrays proposal. Its purpose is to test, document, and refine a condensed version of the cross-disciplinary curriculum that I am developing as co-PI, generating both pedagogical data and preliminary evidence of feasibility for the NSF revision.

The workshop brings together a small cohort of 6–10 students from graphic design and the biological sciences for three days of intensive, collaborative work with actual genomic datasets provided by the Tsai lab. It is structured as a research instrument as much as a pedagogical event: the animating question is not “can students make science visually appealing?” but “which design strategies produce genuine comprehension of complex genomic data in non-specialist audiences?” Each day advances that question in a different register.

Day 1 establishes shared ground. Biology and graphic design students work with chromosome maps, M147 distribution diagrams, sequence abundance visualizations from their respective disciplinary positions. A structured looking exercise makes the gap between scientific literacy and visual legibility explicit and productive: biology students articulate what the data shows; design students articulate what it communicates, and what it fails to communicate. That gap is the brief. Each participant or pair selects one aspect of the M147 dataset and a defined non-specialist audience, and produces first-concept sketches by end of day.

Day 2 is design development and structured critique. Participants work in their chosen medium, e.g. print, mixed media, digital, 3-D, without format constraint, translating their concept into visual form. A mid-day critique crosses the disciplinary divide deliberately: biology students evaluate scientific accuracy; graphic design students evaluate communicability. Points of disagreement between the two are treated as data, not error. Participants iterate based on the critique, and end the day with near-final work documented and brief written reflections collected. Those reflections constitute the first layer of pedagogical documentation for the NSF revision.

Day 3 moves to installation and public presentation. Work is installed as prototypes in the gallery space at the Lamar Dodd School of Art — resolved enough to exhibit, explicitly framed as first-iteration research rather than finished product. A small invited audience attends a brief public presentation in which participants explain their work and their design decisions. Professional documentation of the installed work is produced. A structured debrief closes the workshop, generating the facilitation notes, audience metrics, and participant reflection data that will form the evidence base for the full-scale curriculum proposal.

The $1,000 Arts Collaborative mini-grant supports materials, installation hardware, catering across the three working days, and documentation. All facilitation is provided by me as in-kind contribution; data, datasets, and scientific expertise are provided by Dr. Tsai and Senior Research Associate Ran Zhou as in-kind from the Warnell School. Both contributions are being documented explicitly as evidence of institutional commitment for the NSF resubmission.

The workshop is currently in active planning. Its outputs, comprising exhibited prototypes, participant reflections, audience metrics, and a documented exhibition record, will address the one substantive request made by NSF reviewers across all five reviews: the addition of measurable audience impact data to the Broader Impacts component. The Satellite DNA Art Studio component received no criticism; two reviewers cited it as a specific strength. The pilot workshop transforms that concept into evidence.

The neuroline series investigates a specific perceptual phenomenon: the involuntary extraction of grids, rhythms, and patterns from surfaces, textures, and light. This is not a stylistic interest or an aesthetic preference — it is a documented feature of my neurotype, formally identified following my 2022 neurodivergence diagnosis. The research question the series poses is whether an experience that originates in a particular kind of mind can be translated into a spatial form legible to a different kind of mind.

The series works with two interlocking materials: the archives — a collection of analog and digital video, photography, screenshots, and screen recordings spanning more than four decades, with the earliest precisely dated footage from 1984 — and salvaged electronics sourced from UGA’s surplus warehouse and elsewhere. The footage is not illustrative documentation of a concept. It is primary research data: recordings made across more than four decades by a mind that was already doing this, before there was language for what it was doing.

neuroline_01

neuroline_01 (C-U-B-E Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art, November 14 – December 15, 2023) was my first solo exhibition at UGA. The installation drew from the archives, assembled into a 30-minute loop projected in the gallery space. A second component introduced a live analog feedback mechanism: a camera filmed the projection screen and the people in front of it, with that live feed mixed directly into the projected image. Audience members could interact with the loop in real time by blocking part of the projection path — their presence altered the signal, making the viewer part of the pattern rather than a passive observer of it. The installation enacted, rather than illustrated, the research question: a perceptual loop that cannot be fully controlled, only inhabited.

neuroline_02a

neuroline_02a (Lupin Foundation Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art, February 8 – March 20, 2024) was presented as part of the “Trust Fall” Faculty Exhibition. The installation comprised three 6-minute video loops playing concurrently at slightly variable speeds, generating a combinatorial visual field that resists repetition. All hardware was constructed from electronics sourced from UGA’s surplus warehouse and other salvaged components — a practice I call Yestertech: a working studio philosophy in which decommissioned and obsolescent technology is treated not as constraint but as conceptual position. Using hardware that institutions have discarded enacts an argument about what remains useful, what remains valid, and what accumulates meaning precisely by persisting past its intended obsolescence.

neuroline_02b

neuroline_02b is the third installation in the series, currently in planning. The concept extends the Yestertech methodology to a new hardware form: an array of salvaged miniature screens, sourced from decommissioned digital cameras and similar devices, receiving simultaneous video feed. I am investigating the technical feasibility of routing simultaneous feeds to multiple low-resolution, architecturally varied screens. The installation will produce a fragmented, distributed image field: the same perceptual phenomenon rendered across surfaces that were never designed to work together.

The neuroline series is my active artistic output. The research of translating neurodivergent perceptual experience into spatial form is ongoing, and the archives from which it draws continue to grow. neuroline emerges from a broader retrospective inquiry: a re-examination of 45 years of creative work made before I had language for what I was investigating. A parallel inquiry is currently in development in the pareidolia photography series, which applies a similar retrospective approach to a distinct perceptual phenomenon.

Context

No unified map of the Athens public transit system currently exists. Riders navigate a fragmented landscape: separate maps for UGA bus routes, separate maps for Athens-Clarke County routes, no single view showing how the two systems connect. The most recent attempt at a comprehensive UGA bus map dates to 2015. This fragmentation is artificial. Both systems are fare-free and available to all riders; from a user perspective, they function as a single network. The UGA transit app includes ACC routes, but segregates them in a separate area of the interface — a design decision that reinforces a bureaucratic boundary invisible to the person standing at a bus stop.

The fragmentation is not only organizational. Both systems share a vendor platform, Passio Go, which renders routes as overlaid lines on a geographically accurate base map. Because the underlying map is geographically correct, routes that share corridors are drawn directly on top of one another, becoming illegible. A rider trying to understand the full network cannot see it — not because the information doesn’t exist, but because the display system makes it unreadable. This is an accessibility problem at multiple levels: it fails riders who are unfamiliar with the city, riders with cognitive or visual processing differences, and any rider who needs to plan a multi-leg journey across both systems.

My research asks two related questions: is a unified, readable map of the full Athens transit system achievable, and can artificial intelligence be used to optimize both the map’s design and the underlying route structure it depicts? The first question is a design research problem with direct community application. The second points toward a larger ambition: an agentic design system capable of maintaining, optimizing, and updating a transit map autonomously in response to real-world route changes.

Process

I bring to this project a specific prior expertise in complex transit map design — the kind of systems-level cartographic problem that requires both data literacy and typographic precision. That expertise is the methodological foundation of the research, not its claim.

The central design problem is geometric: geographically accurate maps cannot display overlapping routes legibly. The solution, established in the tradition of transit cartography from Beck’s 1933 London Underground map forward, is schematization — a designed abstraction that sacrifices geographic literalism in favor of relational clarity. Applying schematization to the combined Athens network, with its irregular street grid, shared corridors, and divergent route structures, required sustained iterative problem-solving across variables that include line weight, angle constraints, corridor sequencing, braiding order, node spacing, and typographic hierarchy.

My process moved through four documented stages. Initial route structure and spatial logic were worked out through large-format hand drawings, allowing rapid testing of layout alternatives before committing to software. Structural variables were then developed and refined across multiple iterations in Figma. Once the visual system was stable, production shifted to Affinity Designer, selected for its superior vector precision for this class of problem. The near-complete artifact, v6.02, is a unified map of the full Athens transit network — both UGA and Athens-Clarke County routes — at approximately 30 × 40 inches, representing the first complete map of the combined system. At this scale the map is legible as a large-format print; a paper map is a useful byproduct, not the end goal.

The current phase of the research addresses a problem this project shares with transit map design globally: maintaining map currency as routes change. Larger rail systems have addressed live vehicle tracking through electronic displays and GPS-based mobile apps, but no established solution exists for route changes in bus-based systems. Two distinct technical problems must be solved. First, live GPS tracking data must be translated onto a map that is deliberately non-geographic — the schematic map must be “mapped” against the real network it abstracts. Second, and more complex, an AI system must be able to reference not only route and stop data as GPS coordinates, but the full bus-navigable street network, and make layout decisions — sequencing, braiding, stop placement, line ordering — on demand, for any route change. I am currently conducting early experimental work on this problem using generative AI tools in Figma, working with live data from both transit systems. A collaboration with researchers in mathematics and computer science is in formation.

Status and Trajectory

The Athens Transit Map is the first complete map of the combined UGA and Athens-Clarke County bus network. The static map is a documented research artifact and a proof of concept; the research goal is an agentic design system that can maintain and update a schematic transit map autonomously, reading live route data and making layout decisions like sequencing, braiding, or stop placement on demand. Active experimental work toward this goal is underway now, using generative AI tools in Figma with live data from both transit systems. The formation of an interdisciplinary collaboration with mathematics and computer science is in progress, which will be necessary to advance the AI optimization and route redesign phases of the research program. The questions at the center of this project, whether design-based methods can optimize the infrastructure they visualize, and whether an agentic system can sustain a living map, are positioned for external funding in both design and computer science.

• Hewitt Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale Study
• “Mindfulness and the Creative Process” — AIGA Design Conference 2023

Hewitt Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale Study

Drawing on two decades of design teaching and my yoga instructor training, I developed a repeatable research methodology pairing a validated perfectionism instrument with a standardized meditative drawing task to test whether perfectionism and creativity operate in measurable opposition.

Context

Across two decades of teaching graphic design and a 500-hour yoga instructor training (RTY-500, E-RYT200), I have observed a consistent inverse relationship between perfectionism and creative output — that the closer a designer moves toward an ideal of perfection, the more constrained creative space becomes. Perfectionism and creativity, I argue, operate in direct opposition: perfectionism narrows; creativity demands openness.

This research asks whether that relationship is measurable. The methodology pairs two instruments: the Hewitt Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS), a validated psychological questionnaire measuring self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed perfectionism; and a standardized drawing task administered immediately following a guided gazing meditation. The gazing instrument is a sheet of paper with a central dot and an approximately seven-inch circle — a form with deep roots in Vedic contemplative practice as an object of concentrated attention. Participants gaze at the dot, pen in hand, and on command draw freely within the circle. A small, unobtrusive identification number in the corner of each sheet links the resulting drawing to its corresponding MPS response, creating a paired dataset of perfectionism profiles and visual output produced under conditions of deliberate openness.

Contribution

I designed the methodology pairing a validated perfectionism instrument with a standardized drawing task administered in a meditative state. The research module distills the pedagogical framework developed in the Summer 2021 course into a repeatable, controlled procedure: participants complete the Hewitt MPS, undergo a guided gazing meditation on a standardized visual instrument — a sheet bearing a central dot within an approximately seven-inch circle — and draw freely within the circle. The same instrument is used in every administration; what varies is the participant, not the task. A small identification number printed in the corner of each sheet links each drawing to its corresponding MPS response.

I administered the module in two contexts. In Spring 2023, I integrated it into ARGD 2010 (Graphic Design Survey) at UGA, producing 69 MPS responses and 65 paired drawings. (Four participants completed the MPS but did not produce a drawing, having arrived late or not followed instructions.) In October 2023, I presented the research at the AIGA Design Conference in New York City — the primary annual gathering of the professional design community in the United States — and conducted a workshop using the same methodology. The AIGA session was selected through competitive proposal review, constituting external validation of the research. The workshop produced 43 MPS responses and 43 paired drawings. The combined dataset comprises 112 MPS responses and 108 drawings, each anonymized and linked by individual identification number.

Research-as-Teaching

Mindfulness and the Creative Process originated in the classroom. A Summer 2021 special topics course of the same name, with a mix of undergraduate and graduate students, was the generative environment in which the methodology was first tested. Over four weeks, seven students worked at the intersection of design practice and contemplative tradition: sitting and walking meditations, intuitive drawing, translation of sound into visual form, exploration of sacred geometry as both design object and meditative instrument. After guiding the students through the gazing meditation I had developed and seeing the results, the idea to expand on it experimentally began to form.

The stand-alone research module emerged from that idea as a distillation: what could be isolated, controlled, and administered repeatably? The gazing meditation and drawing task retained the pedagogical core — deliberate suspension of evaluative pressure — while adding the Hewitt MPS to make the question empirical. Teaching generated the research question; the research module is now redeployed in the teaching context (ARGD 2010) and tested beyond it (AIGA Design Conference).

The student population in ARGD 2010 is not a neutral sample. DRC notifications and student self-disclosure indicate a notable proportion of neurodivergent students in the courses where the module has been administered. This is not incidental. Perfectionism is a documented feature of AuDHD presentation, and the course population that generated the dataset is the same population for whom the research question carries the most direct stakes.

Status and Trajectory

The dataset contains 112 MPS responses paired with 108 drawings, collected across two administrations (ARGD 2010, Spring 2023; AIGA Design Conference, October 2023). Analysis is pending. The open research question whether perfectionism profile predicts measurable characteristics in the resulting drawings remains unanswered for now.

The project sits at the intersection of two research threads. As a perception inquiry, it asks how psychological orientation shapes the visual forms a designer produces under conditions of deliberate openness. As an emergent accessibility concern, it asks what that answer would mean for neurodivergent designers, a population in which perfectionism is a known barrier to output and for whom the stakes of that question are not abstract. My 2022 AuDHD diagnosis sharpened this trajectory: what began as a universal claim about creativity and perfectionism is now legible as a question with particular relevance to neurodivergent creative practice.

The methodology’s next phase depends on analysis of the existing dataset. The advent of AI-assisted pattern recognition across visual datasets opens a possible path: if perfectionism profile correlates with identifiable visual characteristics in the drawings, AI tools may make that correlation detectable at scale. This is a trajectory, not a claim. The dataset exists. The analysis has not yet been conducted.

“Mindfulness and the Creative Process” — AIGA Design Conference 2023

The October 2023 workshop at the AIGA Design Conference in New York City brought the methodology to a professional audience of designers, educators, and researchers — a population distinct from the undergraduate students who generated the first dataset. Forty-three participants completed the Hewitt MPS, underwent the guided gazing meditation, and produced drawings within the standardized instrument. The workshop format tested portability: could the methodology hold outside the institutional structure of a course, with self-selecting professionals rather than enrolled students? The 43 paired responses suggest it can. The session was selected through AIGA’s competitive proposal review process, and the dataset it generated constitutes the second of two research administrations, complementing the Spring 2023 ARGD 2010 collection.

Context

In 2025, the federal government prohibited the use of specific research terms across agencies including the CDC and NIH — words and phrases associated with diversity, equity, inclusion, and related areas of scientific inquiry. The prohibition operates at the level of language itself: researchers and institutions are expected to remove these terms from documents, grant applications, and public-facing materials, often without explicit mandate. The question Verboten poses is typographic: what happens when a font performs that censorship on your behalf?

A tool for preemptive compliance

Verboten is built on a modified version of Arial, a ubiquitous typeface which is almost exclusively used in research publications. Using OpenType ligature substitution, I encoded each term from the 2025 federal prohibited list as a custom ligature:¹Ligature (typography): two or more letters that are joined as a single glyph. Common examples include ‘fi’, ‘fl’, and ‘ae’. The mechanism is similar to the string ‘TM’ automatically creating the Trademark symbol ™. when any of these words or phrases is typed in Verboten, the font automatically replaces it with a custom ligature that renders the word as if struck through with a black marker. The redaction is not applied by a human hand or an external tool. It is built into the letterforms. The font does the compliance for you.

The technical method is precise and conceptually loaded. OpenType ligature substitution is a standard mechanism in professional type design, used to handle character combinations that require special treatment — ligatures like fi or fl, or other contextual alternates. Here, the same mechanism is repurposed: instead of resolving a typographic problem, it performs a political act. The typeface enacts what theorist Timothy Snyder calls anticipatory obedience — the preemptive compliance with authority that makes suppression self-sustaining. Verboten makes that compliance visible, material, and legible as a designed object.

The project extends into installation. The proposed public form places a networked printer on a pedestal. Visitors upload a document to verbotenfont.org; an automated system inspects the file, resets the text in Verboten, generates a PDF, returns it to the sender by email, and simultaneously prints it on the gallery printer. The output accumulates on the floor. Pages may be pinned to the wall. The printer is the performer; the falling paper is the evidence. No human intervention is required.

Status and Trajectory

Verboten is an active project in development. The Regular weight typeface is complete; Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic weights are in progress. A proof-of-concept installation is scheduled at the C-U-B-E Gallery for summer 2026, following the completion of the academic year. The web interface and networked printer output will be realized in that context. As the federal list of prohibited terms continues to expand, the typeface requires ongoing curatorial maintenance — a condition that is, itself, part of the research record.

Context

The project began with a conversation about images. Dr. Jim Grigsby — Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado Denver and a grant-writing mentor to me during the EVA/SBIR phase — was assembling visual material for his institution’s interim website when we identified a shared problem: the mainstream iconography available to depict psychedelic research is generic, defaulting to photographic clichés that bear no relationship to how psilocybin-assisted therapy actually functions as a clinical and perceptual process. The imagery on offer does not capture the mechanism. That gap — between available visual language and the thing it purports to represent — is exactly the kind of design problem my research is built to address.

What began as a conversation about stock photography became a commission, and the commission became a research experiment. The CU Denver Center for Psychedelic Research, launched in 2024, is a transdisciplinary center focused on the therapeutic mechanisms and public health implications of psychedelic interventions. It required an identity capable of holding the register of rigorous clinical science and the register of embodied perceptual experience simultaneously — without collapsing into either institutional sterility or counterculture cliché.

Contribution

The project was structured as a deliberate experiment from the outset. The research question driving it: can generative AI, operated by an experienced designer within a rigorous strategic framework, produce a brand concept that generic AI identity tools cannot — and does the process itself constitute a new design methodology?

The work began with strategy: audience analysis, institutional positioning, and semantic mapping of the center’s domain — the conceptual groundwork that off-the-shelf AI logo generators bypass entirely. From that foundation, I developed the identity through structured AI prompt-based iteration, with full documentation of the generative sequence. The methodology is the research: not AI as a shortcut, but AI as a design instrument in the hands of an experienced practitioner working within an explicit conceptual framework.

The result is the “brain flower” — a mark whose form derives from the visual language of MR tractography: the rendered pathways of white matter fibre connections in the human brain, in which dense bundles of neural strands radiate and curve outward from a central axis, resembling organic growth as much as anatomy. The reference is precise: Patric Hagmann’s tractography visualizations of the human connectome depict the brain not as a fixed structure but as a dynamic network — a set of nodes and edges in constant relational flux. Translated into graphic form, those strand-bundles become petals; the connectome becomes a flower. The mark holds both readings simultaneously, which is exactly what the center’s work requires: a scientific instrument and a living thing.

What distinguishes this mark from a conventional logo deliverable is its designed intent. The “brain flower” is conceived not as a fixed object but as a variable system: color, form, and shape are designed to respond to user interaction and contextual input in real time, positioning the identity on the boundary between brand mark and behavioral entity — mascot-adjacent without full anthropomorphization. This is not decorative flexibility. It is a research proposition: that a visual identity can function as an adaptive interface layer, responding to the person encountering it rather than presenting a single fixed face. The concept connects directly to my broader inquiry into AI-enabled interfaces that modify their behavior in response to user context — parallel in principle to the emotional responsiveness built into ArchPal, but operating at the level of visual form rather than language.

Status and Trajectory

The project is active and in phased deployment. A first implementation phase is currently live on Dr. Grigsby’s institutional website, where it replaces the generic stock imagery that prompted the original collaboration. A fully independent website for the center — outside the university umbrella and not subject to current university policy restrictions — is in development. Subsequent phases, including animated real-time variation of the mark and a planned lobby sculpture for the center’s physical space, await institutional funding. Full process documentation of the AI-based generative sequence exists.

About the Project

Embodied: An Urban Yogi’s Memoir + Manifesto for Modern Living is the debut book by Atlanta-based mindfulness teacher and authorized swami Jaya Devi, whose practice spans thirty years of teaching and whose clients include the CDC, CNN, Coca-Cola, Georgia Tech, and the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Published in 2022, the book is a hybrid of memoir, philosophy, and practical guidance for integrating contemplative practice into contemporary life.

Design Practice

I designed the book jacket and supporting promotional materials through a working process I consider a model for the practice of communication design: not designing for a client but with one. The project required sustained conversation about the book’s intent, its interior logic, and what Swami Jaya Devi wanted a reader to feel before the first page. The author’s active involvement in the design process — at the level of meaning rather than approval — shaped every visual decision. Most market-driven design work does not support this model; the economics of commercial production do not allow for it. Seeking out commissions that do is both a professional practice commitment and a form of ongoing research into what collaborative authorship looks like in communication design.

The commission was pro-bono, growing out of a relationship with Swami Jaya Devi that predated the project by more than a decade. My own yoga practice and training had already informed the development of my research into mindfulness and the creative process, which began in 2021. The book jacket was a separate output of that longer relationship — a professional gesture made from inside a shared practice, not a catalyst for it.

Context

The Lamar Dodd School of Art occupies a structurally complex building: two wings joined by a central connector, with an exterior bridge linking a secondary access point at the opposite end. The building was designed without dedicated wayfinding infrastructure. No surfaces were designated for signage, and university policy prohibits irreversible alteration of structural elements, including the building’s exposed concrete columns. The “user” (students, faculty, visitors) must navigate a spatially disorienting environment without guidance, relying on informal knowledge that new and occasional visitors simply do not have.

The challenge assigned to the Art School’s Technology and Space Committee, on which I served from 2022 to 2024, was to develop a comprehensive wayfinding system for the entire building within a total budget of only $3,000. Under these constraints I opted for a simple option: vinyl-cut and pre-printed signs affixed to the building’s exposed concrete columns, its most visible, consistent, and unoccupied architectural feature.

Contribution

Color Contrast Study

I initiated the project with a material research study. Rather than selecting colors from a standard palette and applying them to the building, I fabricated sign prototypes in multiple color variants, applied them directly to the building’s concrete columns under in-situ conditions, and conducted a photographic analysis to assess legibility across variable lighting conditions and viewing distances throughout the building. The study produced the color specification on which the entire system is founded — an empirical grounding that distinguishes the Dodd’s wayfinding system from conventional institutional signage practice, where color selection is typically driven by brand standards rather than substrate and environment.

The Design System

The wayfinding system comprises approximately 90 individual signs across three typologies: 45 large directional column signs distributed across three floors, 30 smaller area identifiers, and 14 floor plan panels. The system is organized around a dual color-coding logic operating at two scales.

At the macro scale, a distinct color is assigned to each floor, giving users an immediate visual anchor for their location within the building’s vertical structure. Beyond that, a four-tier visual hierarchy governs how spaces are represented on floor plan panels: 1. essential navigation functions (elevator, restroom, exit, ADA access); 2. public-access spaces such as galleries and student services; 3. programmatic spaces (classrooms and departmental offices); and 4. emergency functions, including tornado shelter locations. The first three tiers are assigned a distinct value within the floor’s color sub-palette, creating a system legible at a glance without requiring users to read labels before orienting themselves. Emergency functions are displayed in magenta, a vibrant color that is contrasting all other colors in the palette, creating a visual distinction for best readability in extraordinary circumstances.

The full system includes area identifiers for wings and zones, directional signage for primary circulation routes, and a main directory. The design direction was formally approved by the Technology and Space Committee committee. I produced all prototypes and final artwork.

Access and Embodied Design

The Dodd Wayfinding System predates my AuDHD diagnosis. The system’s emphasis on immediate perceptual orientation (color before text, hierarchy before detail, location before direction) was driven by design instinct rather than documented accessibility intent. My subsequent diagnosis has reframed that instinct: the logic of the system reflects an embodied understanding of how many neurodivergent users process spatial information, prioritizing visual anchors over verbal instruction. The fact that the building has seven ground-floor entrances, several of which are not wheelchair accessible, further underscores the access stakes of a functional wayfinding system and the significance of the as-yet-uninstalled floor plan panels, which are positioned precisely at the decision points of entrances, staircases, and the elevator on all three floors.

Status and Trajectory

The upper sections of the large directional column signs, the primary floor and wing identifiers, are installed and complete on all three floors. The remaining elements of the system: the lower sections of the directional signs, 30 area identifiers, and 14 floor plan panels positioned at entrances, staircases, and the elevator, are designed, prototyped, and production-ready. Their installation has stalled for institutional and facilities reasons outside my power. The complete design system, including all artwork, color specifications, and material documentation, exists and is deployable.

Description

ARGD 4020 is the Graphic Design area's upper-level studio course in environmental branding and experiential graphic design. It addresses how visual identity systems shape, and are shaped by, the physical environments and experiences they live within: signage, wayfinding, placemaking, exhibition design, and the integration of brand language across spatial scales. My redesign moved the course away from a narrow technical specialization (environmental design as a niche sub-field within graphic design) and toward the broader contemporary practice of brand storytelling, environmental and experiential branding, and identity systems that operate across digital and physical media. The new framing, formalized in the 2022/23 bulletin revision, makes the course's content applicable to a much wider range of student career trajectories than the prior course title implied.

Pedagogical structure

The course is organized around my conviction that upper-division students need real-world conditions, not exercises that simulate them.

Stone Mountain RFP (semester-long team project). In Fall 2022 I co-taught the course with Krista Coleman-Silvers, a landscape architect and UGA adjunct instructor, joining my graphic design section with her landscape architecture section into a single combined studio. Together we drafted a Request for Proposal modeled on professional industry practice and asked teams of three students, each operating under a self-named “design agency,” to submit a rebrand and re-imagining of Stone Mountain Park. The brief required teams to address the park's Confederate carving, its post-pandemic financial troubles, and its place in the public life of Georgia. The team-based structure prepared students for agency work environments by foregrounding collaboration, role distribution, communication, and joint deliverable management.

Transdisciplinary co-teaching. The Coleman-Silvers collaboration was, beyond its immediate pedagogical value, an explicit experiment in joining graphic design with landscape architecture inside a single studio. Students worked across two disciplinary perspectives on the same brief and learned to navigate the differences in vocabulary, deliverable expectations, and analytical frameworks that the two disciplines bring to environmental design.

AI integration. I introduced generative AI tools into ARGD 4020 as process tools for mood-board generation, mock-up production, and prototyping in 2023, immediately following the public release of ChatGPT and the rapid maturation of image-generation models.

Mindfulness Mapping as spatial experiential graphic design. I migrated the Mindfulness Mapping exercise (originally developed in my Mindfulness and the Creative Process course) into ARGD 4020 as a spatial experiential graphic design assignment. Students work in pairs to construct, in a virtual reality 3D painting application (Open Brush), a partner’s described memory of a meaningful place. The exercise treats the visualized memory as an act of experiential design: building an environment for one person's perception of another's narrative. It connects directly to the course’s broader concerns with place, brand, and embodied experience.

Trajectory

ARGD 4020 has become, in effect, my primary upper-division laboratory for testing pedagogical commitments that originate elsewhere in my teaching and research. The Mindfulness Mapping migration is the clearest example: an exercise developed in an entirely different course migrated productively into ARGD 4020 because the underlying pedagogical question (how to teach embodied, spatial, experiential design) was the same. Future iterations will continue to draw on my research in AI as a process tool and my ongoing typeface design methodology (see R-08) as the course's environmental branding scope expands to include digital-physical hybrid identity systems.

Description

The course addressed the intangible nature of creativity itself: the part of the design process that precedes any visible artifact. I cross-listed it across three course numbers (ARGD 4080 in graphic design, ARST 4915 in contemporary art at the undergraduate level, ARST 6915 at the graduate level) so that students from across the art school could enroll regardless of discipline or degree level. I built the curriculum at the intersection of art and design practice with my own training in yoga and my reading of Vedic and Buddhist philosophies, drawing on texts by Chögyam Trungpa, Michael A. Franklin, Christopher Chapple, William K. Mahony, Eknath Easwaran, and Sri Swami Satchidananda. The framing throughout was that creativity is a process before it is a product, and that the most useful thing a course can do for an emerging designer or artist is build their awareness of the conditions under which their own creative work happens.

Pedagogical structure

The course used four recurring instructional modes, layered across the four-week intensive.

Meditation as a recurring weekly frame. Each week opened with a guided sitting and walking meditation followed by group reflection and discussion. The intent was not to convert the course into a yoga class but to establish a contemplative baseline against which the rest of the week's design work could be evaluated. Students were asked to notice how their attention shifted before and after the practice.

Ungraded assignments. I designed the entire assignment structure to operate without letter grades. Submitted work received critique and discussion but no rubric-based assessment. The decision was deliberate: removing the grade reveals what the student is actually drawn to. The discovery I made through this course, and which has shaped my approach to assessment in every subsequent course, is that ungraded work in a contemplative frame produces more candid and more inventive student outcomes than the same work produced for a letter.

Visual practices as inquiry into perception. Class activities included collaging, translations of sound and music into visual form, and the construction of a virtual reality space. These activities treated the act of making as a tool for studying how a particular mind perceives, encodes, and represents experience. Across the cross-listed cohort, the divergence in how individual students translated the same prompt was itself a primary teaching artifact.

Design as instrument of mindfulness. Alongside the studio work, students investigated how visual design itself can function as a contemplative instrument: the geometry of mandalas, the structural logic of yantras, and the broader tradition of Sacred Geometry as visual practice. This reversed the usual framing of mindfulness-and-art (mindfulness in service of better art) and asked instead what design has historically offered to contemplative practice.

Outputs and reception

The course generated three concrete outputs that continue to do work in my teaching and research record.

Mindfulness Mapping VR exercise. The paired narrator/listener exercise that uses a VR 3D painting application (Open Brush) to construct a partner's described memory of a meaningful place was first developed and tested in this course. I have since migrated it into ARGD 4020 (Environmental Branding) as a spatial experiential graphic design assignment.

Hewitt MPS dataset. Subsequent deployment of mindfulness-based exercises in ARGD 2010 (Graphic Design Survey) produced a research dataset: individual student responses to the Hewitt Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale combined with drawings produced during guided meditation. The dataset is preliminary research material for ongoing empirical work on how perfectionism shapes the creative process in design students.

AIGA Design Conference 2023 invited workshop. I presented “Mindfulness and the Creative Process: a hands-on workshop focusing on the intangible nature of creativity” at the 2023 AIGA Design Conference (theme: “The View From Here”). The workshop translated the core methods of the UGA course for a national audience of practicing designers and design educators and established the course's reach beyond the UGA campus.

Trajectory

The course itself ran one time, but its methods and outputs have continued to inform my work. The Mindfulness Mapping exercise is now part of an upper-division studio. The Hewitt MPS dataset is the foundation of an ongoing research line. The AIGA workshop opened the question of whether the course should return as a recurring offering at UGA, and I plan to propose a Maymester re-offering once my current research load allows. I treat Mindfulness and the Creative Process as a one-time intensive that opened multiple longer trajectories rather than as a course that needed to be repeated.

Description

Mindfulness Mapping is a multi-day paired exercise that uses virtual reality as a primary design medium without requiring students to have prior training in VR software or 3D design tools. The exercise is built around a deliberate translation chain: a student's spatial memory becomes verbal description, which becomes another student's notes, which becomes a virtual environment that the original narrator then enters and reacts to. Each step of that chain is a translation across mediums, and the gaps between the steps are themselves teaching material.

I developed the exercise in Summer 2021 inside the Mindfulness and the Creative Process course [see T-02], where the construction of a virtual reality space was already one of the course's recurring activities. The version that emerged from that context (paired narrator/listener, VR reconstruction, invited reentry, written reflection) has been the stable form ever since.

The process

The exercise unfolds across two parts on two different class days.

Part 1 — Description. Each student takes approximately five minutes to choose a meaningful place from memory, with the prompt favoring "one of your favorite places from your childhood": a location deeply anchored in their own experience. The pair then divides into roles: Student A is the narrator, Student B is the listener. The narrator describes the chosen place in as much sensory detail as possible while the listener takes notes and asks clarifying questions. After 20 to 30 minutes (timed), the roles switch. Both students independently transcribe their notes and submit them.

Part 2 — Construction. On a separate day, using a virtual reality headset running a 3D painting application (typically Open Brush), Student A constructs Student B's described space from the transcribed notes over approximately 90 minutes (timed), with Student B providing periodic check-ins and time announcements. When the build is complete, Student A invites Student B into the space to experience it. Student B shares feedback, and the pair discusses the experience for 10 to 30 minutes. After a break (or on another class day) the exercise repeats with roles reversed. Both students submit individual written reflections.

What it teaches

The exercise carries a set of pedagogical arguments I believe are best taught experientially rather than lectured.

Memory as design material. Students learn to treat their own spatial memory as a primary input to design work, noticing what details persist, what sensory channels carry the most information for them individually, and how their own perception structures recall.

Design as interpretation, not transmission. The gap between what one student described and what their partner built is the most direct evidence I have ever produced in a classroom that design is interpretive work. No two interpretations of the same description are alike, and the moment a narrator enters the listener's interpretation of their own memory is consistently the moment they understand what design actually does to language.

Embodied and proprioceptive learning. Virtual reality makes spatial design experiential in a way that screen-based 3D modeling cannot. Students draw with their hands at body scale, walk inside their constructions, and respond physiologically to the spaces they and their partners build.

Accessibility for non-experts. Open Brush requires no prior training in 3D modeling software, and the controller-based painting interface lowers the technical barrier so that the design challenge (translating verbal description into spatial form) can be addressed without first overcoming a software learning curve. Students with no prior 3D design experience produce substantive work within a single 90-minute session.

Description

ARGD 2010 Graphic Design Survey is the area's entry-level studio course, required of every student who pursues the graphic design major and taken by a substantial number of art and non-art majors testing the discipline. By 2022 two converging factors had made the course's previous format untenable. First, the area was revising its admissions structure to admit majors earlier in their undergraduate trajectory, which raised both the enrollment in ARGD 2010 and the stakes of the portfolio review process tied to it. Second, the previous practice of teaching each section independently produced significant content drift between sections, which compromised the fairness of the portfolio review when students from different sections were evaluated against each other on what was nominally the same material. The redesign was my response to both pressures at once.

The redesigned format

The redesigned course operates as a unified lecture series with separate lab sections.

Shared lectures across all sections. All students attend the same lecture meetings, which I and my co-instructors rotate through. The shared lectures guarantee that the foundational content (design principles, hierarchy, composition, color, typography, software fundamentals, critique technique) is identical for every student in the course. Students are exposed to multiple faculty voices and approaches within a single semester rather than experiencing only the perspective of their assigned section instructor.

Smaller lab sections for studio work. The lab portion of the course is taught in sections substantially smaller than a single full-section model would allow, preserving the studio intimacy and one-on-one instructor access that are essential to introductory design pedagogy. Lab sections handle workshop time, critique, and instructor feedback on assignments.

Design thinking foregrounded before software. The redesign deliberately rebalanced the course content away from heavy software instruction and toward design thinking. The shared lectures include conceptual modules on visual problem-solving, design research, and critique frameworks alongside the technical content, treating software fluency as a means rather than an end.

Structural benefits

Beyond the immediate pedagogical improvement, the lecture/lab format produced three operational benefits for the area.

Easier adjunct recruitment. The reduced individual teaching load per faculty member (lab section only, with lecture responsibility shared across the cohort) makes it possible to staff the course with adjunct or visiting faculty when needed, without compromising lecture quality. This addresses a long-standing area concern about scaling instruction to enrollment demand.

Level playing field for portfolio review. Because all students receive the same lectures and the same core content, the portfolio review at the end of the course evaluates students on comparable instructional ground. This addresses an equity concern that had been emerging under the previous fragmented model and protects students whose section assignment is, in practice, arbitrary.

Concentrated faculty preparation effort. The shared lecture model concentrates lecture preparation effort once across the cohort of section instructors rather than duplicated across each section. The freed bandwidth is reinvested in lab-section feedback, critique, and one-on-one instruction, which is where introductory-studio teaching does its most consequential work.

Description

ARGD 3010 Foundations of Graphic Design is a new course I developed and first taught as a Maymester intensive (May 13 – June 3, 2025) in response to an institutional emphasis on improved accommodation for transfer students. The course provides an overview of the foundational language, principles, and skills utilized in graphic design: hierarchy, typography, imagery, systems of visual structure and organization, basic messaging, and competency in relevant design software. It functions primarily as a route for non-majors and minors into substantive design instruction, and structurally as a tool that allows transfer students with prior coursework to demonstrate readiness for the major without backtracking through ARGD 2010, which is offered only during the academic year.

Course design

I built the course around two parallel constraints that operate side by side.

Intensive format for non-majors and minors. As a Maymester offering (weekdays 9:15 am – 2:15 pm for four weeks), the course is structured for students who can dedicate concentrated time to the discipline during a single summer term. The format functions as a compressed bootcamp that delivers semester-length foundational content in an intensive immersion. Students leave the course with the same conceptual and technical foundations that ARGD 2010 graduates carry into the major: an understanding of design as a creative process that combines art and technology to communicate ideas, fluency in hierarchy and composition, the distinction between software proficiency and effective graphic design, and a working vocabulary for analyzing and critiquing visual communication.

Scalable evaluation structure for transfer-student admission. The structural innovation of the course is its evaluation framework, which I designed to be directly adaptable as an admissions evaluation for graphic design transfer students. The same assessment instruments that produce the course grade for non-majors can be re-used, with adjusted criteria, to evaluate transfer applicants for an accelerated path into the major. The course functions, in effect, as a second documented entry point into the program for students whose academic trajectory does not align with the standard ARGD 2010 timing. This is the contribution that makes the course more than a summer offering: it is also a piece of admissions infrastructure available to the area whenever it chooses to deploy it.

Trajectory

The course is on the area’s catalog as a continuing Maymester offering, and the evaluation framework’s adaptability for transfer-student admission is a documented design feature available to the area whenever it chooses to deploy it for that purpose. The first iteration of the course revealed a practical scheduling constraint that the area and I are actively working to address: Maymester begins before most incoming transfer students complete their UGA enrollment, which limits the framework's ability to function as a real-time admissions tool. We are discussing rescheduling options that would move the course to a later summer session or into the Fall semester, so transfer students have time to enroll after their UGA acceptance. Once the scheduling question is resolved, the evaluation framework can be deployed for its intended purpose. The course also sits in productive relation to the ARGD 2010 lecture/lab redesign: both are structural pedagogical responses to enrollment-and-equity problems in the area’s entry pipeline, and both treat curricular access as a systems-design question.

Description

The Satellite DNA Art Studio is the teaching component of an interdisciplinary research project I co-developed with Dr. Chung-Jui Tsai of the Warnell School and the Institute of Bioinformatics at UGA. The project addresses a translation problem at the boundary between genomic research and public understanding. The data structures that geneticists use to describe satellite DNA arrays are abstract, multidimensional, and largely inaccessible to non-specialist audiences, including the colleagues, students, and members of the public who would benefit most from understanding what the research reveals. The teaching component pairs graphic design students (taught by me) with biology students and researchers (in Dr. Tsai’s lab) to translate genomic datasets into intuitive graphic representations, using mixed media, 3D design, multimedia installation, and generative AI as available tools. The intent is that the resulting work will be exhibited publicly, fostering public engagement with science through visual communication and giving design students an authentic collaboration with practicing researchers in a different discipline.

Pilot workshop

The first concrete deployment of the teaching component is a one-off pilot data-visualization workshop currently in development with funding from the $1,000 UGA Arts Collaborative grant. The workshop is scoped as a short intensive in which a small cohort of graphic design students will work alongside Dr. Tsai’s research group on a single tractable dataset, producing exhibition-ready visual interpretations within a contained timeframe. The pilot is designed to test three things: whether the disciplinary translation between graphic designers and biologists produces usable visualization work, whether the workshop format can run independently of large-scale grant funding, and whether the resulting work justifies expansion into a recurring studio component embedded in a credit-bearing course.

Project context

The original NSF research proposal supporting this collaboration (“Function and Dynamics of Aspen-Specific M147 Tandem Repeat Arrays,” $2.4M requested) was not funded. Dr. Tsai is now preparing a new NSF proposal in a different direction — satellite DNA in genome engineering rather than functional study — and has confirmed that the art and data-visualization component continues as a planned broader impacts dimension of the new proposal. The pilot workshop under development with the Arts Collaborative grant is being scoped to run independently of NSF funding timelines, so the teaching arm is not contingent on grant decisions and can move forward at the pace the partnering departments can support.

Trajectory

The short-term trajectory is the pilot workshop itself, which I plan to run within the next academic year once funding and scheduling with Dr. Tsai’s research group are confirmed. The medium-term trajectory is to use the pilot’s outcome to make the case for a recurring studio component embedded in either a Special Problems course (ARGD 4080) or a thematic grad-level offering in a possible collaboration with our new data visualization faculty. The pilot will reveal details about workable cohort size, dataset complexity, and time required. The longer-term trajectory remains the original vision of the project: a sustained interdisciplinary studio course that pairs graphic design students with active research groups in the sciences and produces visualization work that circulates in galleries, public spaces, and the published research record. The teaching arm of this project is, at this stage, infrastructure-in-development.

Description

I am systematically developing and integrating generative AI modules across every course I teach, so students at every level of the Graphic Design program encounter it as a process tool within their core coursework. The argument for that decision is laid out in my Teaching Statement: generative AI capabilities are being baked into the industry-standard design software my students will use professionally, which makes systematic curricular introduction a necessity rather than a choice. The integration treats AI not as a discrete subject confined to one place in the curriculum but as a process tool that should be encountered consistently across the foundational, intermediate, and upper-division phases of the major.

Faculty Learning Community and Student Competition

At the beginning of Fall 2023 I joined the UGA Faculty Learning Community "Engaging with AI – in and beyond the classroom" in order to extend my knowledge of generative AI in an interdisciplinary faculty setting rather than working through these questions alone in my own studio. The FLC operates as a cross-departmental working group of UGA faculty actively integrating AI into their teaching, and membership has given me both an institutional context for my classroom-level work and a network of peers with whom to test pedagogical questions that cross disciplinary boundaries.

Within the FLC, I helped to organize and judge the inaugural UGA GenAI Student Competition, with a submission deadline in March 2024 and a panel of judges drawn from FLC member faculty. I also contributed to the development of a shared resource space available to all UGA faculty engaging with AI in their courses. The competition has continued, and one of my own students, Sophie Brewer, took First Prize in the second year.

The integration across courses

The integration unfolded across eight courses between Spring 2023 and Spring 2025, in the order in which each course's AI-integrated iteration was first deployed. The two fully AI-dedicated courses appear last because their scope is categorically different from the modular integrations that preceded them.

ARGD 4080 — Typeface Design (Spring 2023 onward). AI-assisted concept-to-glyph translation embedded in my rapid-prototyping typeface design methodology. Students use vector-based generative AI tools concurrently with analog instruments and digital image-editing software, producing at least 96 consistent glyphs in an industry-standard font editor.

ARGD 2010 — Graphic Design Survey (Spring 2023 onward; see T-04). Introduction to generative AI as a foundational tool, paired with the redesigned course's emphasis on design thinking before software. Students encounter AI inside the course's foundational principles framework rather than as a separate technical topic.

ARGD 4080 — Summer Studio Creative Portfolio Program (Summer 2023). A jointly administered Grady–Dodd summer offering comprising eight modules; I developed and taught two of those modules (Adobe Crash Course and Typography) with embedded generative AI workflow.

ARGD 4020 — Environmental Branding & Experiential Graphic Design (Fall 2023 onward). Generative AI as a process tool for mood-board generation, mock-up production, and prototyping in the upper-division environmental branding studio. Documented across the syllabi from Fall 2023 onward.

ARGD 4120 — Graphic Design Field Study, Cortona (Summer 2024). The most literal analog-to-digital-to-AI workflow in my teaching, deployed in the five-week Cortona Study Abroad program. In the second week of the course, students take graphite rubbings from medieval Italian stone surfaces, capturing letterforms and ornamental elements drawn from a thousand years of typographic history that have weathered into the city's walls, monuments, and pavements. In the third week, they digitize those rubbings into brand identities and logotypes, using a workflow that moves from the physical rubbing, digital scanning and photographic capture, analog and digital cleanup, vectorization (with generative AI tools available as part of the vectorization and refinement workflow), and final typographic design. The exercise compresses centuries of letterform history into a week of studio work, and it grounds the rest of the Cortona term in evidence students have produced with their own hands directly from the historical record.

ARGD 3020 — Graphic Systems, Reverse Engineering project. A junior-level project that deploys generative AI as an analytical rather than generative tool. Students begin with one existing visual study (a single finalized design they have selected on the basis of independent research into an architectural style, art or design movement, or philosophical idea) and reverse-engineer a system of rules from it, producing ten additional panels that conform to the inferred rule set. The project teaches students to understand visual systems backwards before they can build them forward, treating deconstruction as the prerequisite for construction. Generative AI enters the project as the analytical instrument: students use AI to surface structural logic, to test their inferred rule sets against the original artifact, and to generate additional candidate panels conforming to the system. The project sequence sits inside ARGD 3020 (Graphic Systems), which I teach at the intermediate level, and complements the course's broader work on shape, letterform, grid, and the construction of visual systems from scratch.

Fully AI-dedicated courses (Fall 2024 onward). Two courses I designed in 2024 take generative AI as their full subject rather than as a module within a broader course.

ARGD 4080 / ARST 4915 — Creating with Generative AI, is a cross-listed special problems studio in graphic design and contemporary art that I designed as an open exploration of generative AI tools and the implications of their use in both immediate and long-term scopes. Students engage with the leading generative AI models, tools, and platforms (OpenAI ChatGPT and DALL-E, Google Gemini, Adobe Firefly, and others), develop a working understanding of their capabilities, strengths, and limitations, and complete collaborative research projects and workshops in experimental art and design. The course also focuses on the ethical considerations surrounding generative AI and the implications of these rapid technological advancements for working artists and designers. Four students from the inaugural Fall 2024 offering were selected for national exhibition.

FYOS 1001 — Designing with a Co-Pilot: Using Generative AI in the Creative Workflow, is a seven-and-a-half-week First-Year Odyssey seminar that introduces students across the university (not only art and design majors) to generative AI as a problem-solving tool for visual communication. Each student selects a self-defined communication problem (poster, flyer, presentation, data visualization, digital artwork) and works through it using AI as a process partner, while the course discusses the underlying ethical issues of the technology and how to navigate the narrow path between creative empowerment and academic honesty. The seminar culminates in a group exhibition.

Pedagogical approach

Across all integrated courses, the AI work shares a consistent pedagogical scope.

Process tool, not content generator. I introduce AI tools as instruments for mock-up, ideation, prototyping, and analytical work, never as a substitute for the student's own conceptual work or final-deliverable production. Students are taught to use AI to accelerate or extend their thinking, not to replace it.

Ethical limits and technical opacity. Each integrated course includes explicit attention to the ethical considerations and limitations of generative AI: copyright, training data provenance, environmental cost, the opacity of "black box" mechanisms, and the distinction between authorized academic use and unauthorized substitution. Students are asked to articulate the ethical position of their AI use in their own work.

Industry context. The full argument for curriculum-wide integration as a necessary pedagogical response (rather than an optional enhancement) appears in my Teaching Statement and rests on the rapid embedding of generative AI features into industry-standard design software. The integration documented in this tile is the practical implementation of that argument.

Student recognition

Four students from my Fall 2024 ARGD 4080 / ARST 4915 Creating with Generative AI course — Ashera Ly, Sophie Brewer, Victoria Cliff, and Anela Leide — were selected for the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Design for Democracy exhibition at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. Their posters were on display from October 20 to October 27, 2024, in the Gambrell Center for the Arts and Civic Engagement.

Sophie Brewer, also from the Creating with Generative AI course, went on to win First Prize in the 2025 UGA GenAI Student Competition 2.0, awarded by the UGA Office of Instruction. (I co-organized and co-judged version 1.0 through the UGA AI Faculty Learning Community).

Reception

Selected student evaluation excerpts from AI-integrated courses in 2024:

> “This was such a creative class where we had the opportunity to build things with AI according to our own individual interests. The projects were meaningful and worthwhile. […] It really tied my interests of tech and art together.” > — ARGD 4080 / ARST 4915 Creating with Generative AI, Fall 2024

> “It has been fun to learn from a teacher who is very passionate about design. [Prof. Kappenstein] has always done an excellent job of keeping us engaged and bringing in resources to reference and hold onto.” > — Student evaluation, AI-integrated course, 2024

Trajectory

The integration continues to expand as new courses come into my rotation and as AI capabilities continue to mature. The pedagogical commitment is to keep the modules current with the actual state of industry-standard software rather than to teach a fixed set of AI tools that will be obsolete within a year. I expect to add new modules with each iteration of each course and to retire modules as their underlying tools become outdated.

Description

In two separate engagements between 2020 and 2025, I served as an internal design consultant on Lamar Dodd School of Art identity projects: a brand and messaging workshop for the Athenaeum event space in 2020, followed by an extended consultation on the redesign of the Dodd's primary website from 2022 through its 2025 launch. Both engagements are now complete. They are service contributions only in the sense that the time was donated. The work itself is professional brand-strategy and design consultation of the kind the school would otherwise have had to procure on the open market, and I take on similar work whenever the school asks.

The Athenaeum brand and messaging workshop

In November 2020 I facilitated a two-part brand and messaging workshop with the stakeholders of the Athenaeum, the school's new event space, as the kickoff for the school's upcoming branding engagement with a hired external agency. The workshop produced the foundational brand strategy and messaging framework that would inform the agency's creative work. I remained available throughout the larger engagement as an internal consultant on the agency's deliverables, providing feedback and direction at the points where the school needed design-discipline expertise on the client side of the relationship. The Athenaeum's identity work concluded with the agency's deliverables in place.

The Dodd website redesign

Beginning in Fall 2022 I joined weekly status meetings with Francis Oliver, the Dodd's Communications Manager, and the outside web developer engaged on the school's primary website redesign. My early-phase contribution was strategic rather than executional: I argued for, and helped to redefine, the project's scope so that the redesigned site would serve multiple Dodd units rather than only the school's general audience, expanding the project's structural reach and the return on investment for the units involved. I remained engaged through the design and development phases as the school's internal design counsel on creative work produced by the development team. The redesigned site launched in 2025.

Impact

Both engagements concluded with finished deliverables now in active use. The Athenaeum's brand and messaging framework continues to govern the venue's external identity. The redesigned Dodd website is the school's primary public-facing platform as of 2025 and serves multiple units within the school as a result of the scope-redefinition argument I made at the project's outset. Both projects represent design-discipline professional consultation that I provided to the school at no cost beyond my time, a contribution model the school can continue to draw on as similar identity projects arise.

Trajectory

With both engagements complete, this category of service work has no active project at the moment. I remain open to similar requests from the school — brand strategy facilitation, design-strategic counsel on outside engagements, and other faculty-as-designer contributions where the school's needs intersect my professional expertise. The pattern established by these two engagements (an active practitioner contributing strategic design counsel internally) is one I intend to continue making available.

Instructional technology funding

In 2021 I authored two successful proposals for instructional technology funding. A $7,067 hardware proposal to special Provost funding brought a 74-inch mobile interactive touchscreen monitor into the area's teaching spaces, and a $3,672 software licensing proposal to the UGA Teaching Enhancement and Innovation Fund supported the area's transition to current-version design software. The two proposals secured a combined total of $10,739 in instructional technology funding for the Graphic Design area in a single year.

In 2023 I supported Prof. Julie Spivey, the area chair, in a follow-on funding proposal to the Center for Teaching and Learning. The proposal resulted in the installation of two 96-inch classroom touchscreen displays in the area's primary teaching rooms, one digital whiteboard, and an interactive media display in the school's hallway. The installations remain in active use and have substantially expanded the Graphic Design area's capacity for digital demonstration and student work display.

GD area technology stewardship

Beyond formal funding proposals, I have taken on a semi-organic role as the Graphic Design area's principal technology advisor under the rotating chair structure shared by the area's faculty. The role is not formally titled (the area's official chair is Prof. Julie Spivey, who refers to me as the area's "resident hacksmith") but functions as ongoing technology stewardship and has produced several concrete contributions.

Equipment acquisition under area budget. Within the area's standing budgetary constraints I have researched, specified, and purchased two large-format black-and-white laser printers and one large-format color laser printer for the area's classrooms over the past several years, alongside a new networked color laser printer installed in May 2026 (more on this below).

Equipment maintenance and donation as design practice. A piece of my broader research and creative practice (e.g. neuroline installations and the Yestertech direction within it) is a commitment to keeping older technology running rather than replacing it on industry-defined obsolescence cycles. That commitment has produced direct area benefit: I have personally donated two color laser printers to the area's pool from my own inventory, and I have kept multiple older devices operational past the point at which they would otherwise have been retired and replaced. The contribution is structural rather than glamorous and runs against the grain of how educational technology is typically procured.

Annual student laptop technology requirements. Since 2021 I have written and annually updated the technology requirements document that is issued to incoming Graphic Design majors at the point of admission. The document specifies the laptop hardware and software each student needs to participate effectively in the major’s courses and has governed equipment decisions for five admitted cohorts to date (2021 through 2025). It is a small piece of writing in absolute terms but matters disproportionately to incoming students whose laptop purchase is one of the largest single investments associated with entering the major.

Supply management and organization. I manage and organize the area's shared supplies for student and faculty use under semi-organic role allocation rather than formal assignment.

The May 2026 networked color laser printer. Most recently, I oversaw the specification, vendor selection, IT coordination, and installation of a new networked color laser printer for the Graphic Design area in May 2026. The process involved researching available models against the area's printing volume and quality needs, multiple vendor meetings, and coordination with the Lamar Dodd IT team on networking and access protocols. Funding for the printer came from the area's standing budget rather than a separate proposal. A print and user management software solution will be added in the coming month, after which the deployment is complete and the printer is fully operational under managed access.

Technology and Space Committee service

In 2022, when I was due for committee reassignment, I requested to serve on the Lamar Dodd School of Art’s Technology and Space Committee because its charge overlapped with my expertise and my ongoing research. The committee was tasked with developing a unified wayfinding system for the Dodd’s multiple buildings and addition wings. My committee work led directly to the Dodd Wayfinding System, a tripartite project (research, design, and service) documented in full under professional practice. In condensed form for service purposes: I conducted the initial needs assessment, designed a unified system for maps, floor plans, information signage, and area identifiers, produced final artwork for the system’s elements, and have been supervising the installation rollout across the building complex. The Wayfinding System is the most visible single output of my service at the art school to date.

Trajectory

Both strands of this service are ongoing. On the funding and stewardship side, the area continues to require both formal funding proposals when opportunities arise and informal stewardship at the operational level, and I expect to continue contributing on both fronts. The print and user management software for the May 2026 color laser printer is the near-term next deliverable. I will be serving on the Technology and Space committee in the next academic year, and the Dodd Wayfinding System has remaining installation phases to complete under my supervision. The overall pattern of this service is one I expect to continue: technology and space stewardship operating at both the institutional-committee scale and the area-operational scale, with the same underlying conviction that design-discipline expertise belongs in the rooms where decisions about instructional infrastructure are made.

Description

Pride Yoga was a recurring volunteer service program I designed and taught at the UGA Pride Center (formerly the UGA LGBTQ Resource Center) from Fall 2020 through 2023. The program offered a weekly body-positive and gender-affirming yoga class for LGBTQ students and allies in a space specifically designed to remove the friction that LGBTQ students often encounter in fitness and embodied-practice environments. The conventional yoga classroom is a space many LGBTQ people, particularly transgender and gender-nonconforming students, navigate with significant friction: misgendering by instructors, hyper-gendered cuing, body-scrutinizing aesthetics, and a fitness culture that often demands performance of a specific physical ideal. Pride Yoga was structured to remove that friction by default rather than asking individual students to advocate for accommodations in spaces built against them.

Format and arc

The program evolved organically from a pilot offering into a continuous weekly class over its first year.

Pilot (Fall 2020). I proposed the program to the then-leadership of the UGA LGBTQ Resource Center in 2020 and designed and led two body-positive and gender-affirming outdoor yoga classes as a demand assessment for a possible recurring offering. The Center promoted the classes through their student communications channels; I taught on a volunteer basis.

Bi-weekly (February 2021 onward). Demand from the pilots was sufficient to launch a bi-weekly class beginning February 2021. Classes were held in the Memorial Hall Ballroom or, when the weather allowed, outdoors on the Reed Quad.

Weekly (Fall 2021 onward). After the summer break I shifted the program to a weekly schedule in response to continued and growing student demand. The weekly format held for the remainder of the program.

Conclusion (2023). The program concluded in 2023 with the transition of Pride Center leadership. The new leadership took the Center in a different direction.

Credentials and instructional approach

I taught Pride Yoga under my Yoga Alliance credentials, E-RYT 200 (Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher, 200-hour standard) and RYT 500 (Registered Yoga Teacher, 500-hour advanced standard). My teaching focused on adaptive sequencing, optional cuing without gendered language, trauma-informed instructional principles, and the explicit choice not to require students to perform fitness for the instructor or the room. Students came in their own clothes, used the props that suited their bodies, and chose their own level of engagement. The classroom was a space they could locate themselves in their bodies without having to first prove their right to occupy that space.

Description

The Visiting Graphic Designer program is the Graphic Design area’s recurring event bringing a senior practicing designer to UGA for a public lecture and a multi-day hands-on workshop with students. In March 2024 I organized and hosted the program’s inaugural visitor, Wally Krantz, with funding from the Layton Design Fund.

Krantz is a former Landor New York executive creative director, a former Brand Union worldwide creative director, and a former FutureBrand chief creative officer, with twenty-five years at the top tier of international identity practice. He is also a former colleague, mentor, and friend from my own pre-UGA “agency” life, and I was glad to facilitate our students getting access to a designer at his level.

Wally Krantz

Krantz spent over twenty-five years at major global branding and design agencies. He served as chief creative officer for FutureBrand and as worldwide creative director for Brand Union (now Superunion / Design Bridge), where he coordinated the creative output of twenty-two studios globally. He held three separate tenures at Landor across two offices over fourteen years: he began at Landor's San Francisco studio as senior designer and was the primary designer on the team that created the FedEx identity system; he returned to Landor's New York office twice, first as creative director and then as executive creative director overseeing the entire Landor New York studio. Krantz is currently the founder of the Brooklyn-based strategic design studio Outside Order (OO&Friends). His work has been recognized in the United States and internationally, and he has served on design juries for the Clio Awards, the Art Directors Club, and HOW Magazine. His commentary has appeared on NPR's Marketplace and in Forbes, Fast Company, PRINT, and The New York Times.

The visit

The residency was structured as a public lecture followed by a two-day hands-on workshop.

Public lecture: "Obfuscation as a Way of Engagement in Design." Monday March 25, 2024, 3:00 PM in S151, the school's main auditorium. The lecture introduced Krantz's argument that strategic obfuscation in design (making something initially unclear or unintelligible) can produce the pause, consideration, and engagement that conventional clarity-first design often forecloses. The lecture was open to the school community and drew an audience across the Dodd's units.

Workshop: "Obfuscation as a Way of Engagement." Tuesday March 26 and Thursday March 28, 2024, 2:20 to 4:50 PM, in N215, the Graphic Design studio classroom. The workshop tested the lecture's argument in practice. Working in teams, participating students received a creative brief asking them to develop a graphic branding element for a contemporary new stage play — Julia May Jonas's Problems Between Sisters, in production at the Studio Theatre's Mead Theatre in Washington D.C. and premiering May 8, 2024. The first day focused on concepts and ideation with typography, graphic elements, and color, centered on the title element. The second day extended the work into photography, illustration, and texture across additional touchpoints. Each team developed and presented work to Krantz directly across the two sessions, receiving real-time feedback from one of the senior creatives in global branding practice.

Funding

The visit was funded by the Layton Design Fund, an endowment established by Graphic Design alumna Kelly Layton specifically to support visiting designer programming for the Graphic Design area. The fund's existence made the inaugural visit financially possible at the scale and quality it achieved, and it remains the financial foundation for the area's continuing Visiting Designer program.

Trajectory

The Visiting Graphic Designer program has continued at the Lamar Dodd School of Art beyond the inaugural Krantz visit, with subsequent visitors hosted by other Graphic Design area faculty. My contribution to the ongoing program is the inaugural visit and the format it established: a public lecture followed by a multi-day hands-on workshop, structured as a substantive engagement with a working professional rather than a single short lecture. The format gives student participants direct industry feedback and meaningful portfolio output, which I consider the substantive value the area can deliver through visitor programming. I remain available to host future visits when the rotation reaches me again.

Description

COMPGEN is a working web application that I designed and built between March and April 2026 to generate fully compliant course syllabi from live UGA Bulletin data. The application functions at two layers. The functional layer is service: any faculty member can use the app to produce a compliant, ADA-correct, policy-aligned syllabus in approximately sixty seconds, in place of the multi-hour task the standard syllabus assembly process otherwise requires. The structural layer is research: the project is an applied investigation into a question I consider central to graphic design's near future, namely how designers can use AI to build their own workflow infrastructure rather than only to make artifacts within tools other people have built. Both layers operate inside the same application; the tile treats them in turn.

The accessibility argument

Designers can adopt two basic postures toward generative AI. The first is passive and reactive: AI is something a designer uses to make artifacts (images, layouts, mockups, content) within tools that other people have built. The second is active and infrastructural: AI is something a designer uses to build their own tools, including tools that serve their own workflows or that they can share with others. The two postures look superficially similar (both involve using AI), but they produce different relationships to the discipline. The first leaves designers downstream of whatever the AI vendor ships next. The second positions designers as makers of their own infrastructure.

I built COMPGEN to demonstrate the second posture in practice. My background is in graphic design, not software engineering — the canonical “I’m not a programmer” position from which faculty most often write off the idea of building their own tools. COMPGEN, as a piece of research-through-making, changes this paradigm. Designers using current-generation AI development assistance can now build functional, deployable software that addresses specific workflow problems for themselves and their colleagues. This is an important step towards accessibility, because it can remove barriers in human-computer interaction.

My research statement frames my work as beginning where systems meet the people they were never designed to serve. Faculty drowning in compliance burdens that institutional infrastructure does not address are precisely such a population. The fact that I can now build them tools because AI development assistance has made such tools accessible to non-engineers is itself the access finding, and it sits inside the broader argument my research has been making across other domains.

Core functionality

The application's working features as of the April 2026 prototype:

Live USG Bulletin scraping. A four-strategy parser pulls current course information directly from bulletin.uga.edu, ensuring that bulletin-sourced content in the output document reflects the live state of the course catalog rather than a stale snapshot.

ADA-compliant Word output. The application generates a fully compliant .docx file using semantic Word styles (Title, H1, H2, Normal, List Bullet), a header (left-aligned, 70 percent grey), and page numbers in the footer. The document is accessibility-correct out of the box rather than requiring faculty to structure compliance manually.

Locked compliance content. Required policy sections (Honor Code, AI Policy, Well-Being, Syllabus Statement) are pre-filled with current University Senate language and locked from editing in the application, preventing accidental noncompliance.

Customizable course-specific sections. Editable blocks for Assignment Framework, Grading Framework, and Required Materials accept course-specific content while leaving the compliance structure intact.

General Education Core and Institutional Competencies. Scraped and included automatically when present in the course's bulletin record; omitted cleanly when absent.

Web interface plus PDF export. Course code entry, an optional customization panel, downloadable .docx output, and instructions for PDF conversion as needed.

Regulatory context

COMPGEN exists in the context of a USG Board of Regents mandate, taking effect Fall 2026, that requires public posting of all USG syllabi in a standardized format. The mandate has been framed by its proponents as a transparency measure. In practice, in the absence of enterprise syllabus generation infrastructure at most USG campuses, the mandate displaces the cost of producing those compliant syllabi onto individual faculty members, each of whom must build a compliant document from scratch for each course they teach, each semester they teach it. Across roughly eighteen USG institutions without enterprise tooling, the unbilled faculty labor cost likely runs into thousands of unpaid hours per academic year.

COMPGEN reduces that cost to approximately sixty seconds per syllabus for any faculty member who chooses to use it. The application is, in this respect, a piece of faculty-workload infrastructure that the system itself could have built but did not. Building it independently, from the position of an individual faculty member with an interest in design and workflow tooling, without enterprise procurement or licensing fees, and no IT-department approvals is, in my view, the most direct expression I can offer of the access-and-justice commitment that runs across the rest of my service and research record.

Status and trajectory

The prototype went live on Render.com in April 2026 and has been tested informally by Lamar Dodd colleagues and by faculty in other UGA departments. The application is not yet officially launched. The roadmap for the immediate term includes:

Rich text editing for editable sections (bold, italic, bullets, numbered lists) using Quill.js on the frontend and HTML-to-python-docx conversion on the backend, so faculty can paste formatted Word content into the application without losing structure.

User-stored configurations so faculty can save and recall named defaults across sessions (for example, "ARGD upper-division defaults" or "Gen Ed version").

Cross-listed course handling for graduate-undergraduate stacked courses common to many UGA programs.

The medium-term trajectory includes distribution through workplace-organization networks at UGA and across the University System of Georgia, specifically the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Georgia chapter and United Campus Workers of Georgia (UCW-GA), both of which have ongoing campaigns aligned with the application's purpose. A planned scouting effort will assess syllabus-tooling at other USG institutions and at larger US universities without standardized syllabus generation, in order to understand the broader addressable gap. Potential desktop packaging via Tauri is on the longer-term roadmap for users who prefer a native application over a web interface.

The longer trajectory keeps the project’s core posture intact: a faculty-built tool that demonstrates that designers and other non-engineers can now custom-build the workflow infrastructure their institutions cannot or have not built for them. I expect to extend this research across additional tool-building projects in the years following tenure.