Posts by Hugh Dubberly

Feb 26, 2024

Trust

The concept of “trust” turns up in many discussions about people and organizations —and also in an increasing number of discussions about systems and technology.

Jan 22, 2024

Visualizing 1-to-8-set Venn Diagrams

This poster shows variations on Venn diagrams, outlining a space of possibilities for representing overlapping sets. Cells in each row build on a theme or approach, adding one set to each subsequent cell. Cells in each column have the same number of sets (1 to 8) enabling readers to compare approaches.

Sep 2, 2023

How Might We Help Designers Understand Systems?

By Hugh Dubberly and Paul PangaroPublished in She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 9, Issue 2, Summer 2023 Abstract The Future of Design Education working group on systems outlines the growth of professional practice from a focus on designing artifacts to also include designing systems and designing in the context of systems. They describe a holistic […]

Sep 2, 2023

Rethinking Design Education

By Meredith Davis and Hugh DubberlyPublished in She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 9, Issue 2, Summer 2023 Abstract This opening article for the special issue on the Future of Design Education traces paradigmatic shifts in design, from the twentieth-century mass production of artifacts to the twenty-first-century stewardship of evolving product-service ecologies. These shifts […]

Dec 16, 2022

Unimaginable Death: Visualizations of COVID-19 Pandemic Milestones

Paul Kahn, Hugh Dubberly, and Liuhuaying YangDecember 15, 2022 Abstract:From its emergence in 2019, millions of people have died from COVID.Representing milestones (1,000 deaths, 100,000 deaths, 1 million deaths) challenges journalists and designers.Such large numbers are difficult to comprehend, and they are difficult to represent meaningfully.At the same time, each number was once a living […]

Oct 21, 2022

COVIC: Collecting Visualizations of COVID-19 to Outline a Space of Possibilities

This article appears in Design Issues, Volume 38, Number 4, Autumn 2022

Oct 20, 2022

Why we should stop describing design as “problem solving”

This article appears in Geoff Kaplan’s book“After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet: A History of Graphic Design Pedagogy,”published this fall by MIT Press.The book grew out of a conference at Yale in 2019.A presentation on the same topic was delivered at the conference.

Dec 2, 2021

Gui Bonsiepe: Framing Design as Interface

This article appears in Lara Penin’s book“The Disobedience of Design: Gui Bonsiepe,” a collection of essays about and by Bonsiepe, published by Bloomsbury, as part of its series: Radical Thinkers in Design, edited by Clive Dilnot.

Jan 25, 2019

The relevance of cybernetics to design and AI systems

Knowledge of cybernetics is increasingly relevant to both what and how designers design. Cybernetics is the science of feedback, information that travels from a system through its environment and back to the system. A feedback system is said to have a goal, such as maintaining the level of a variable (e.g., water volume, temperature, direction, […]

Jan 24, 2019

Making sense in the data economy

We perpetually interact with our technologies. On the one hand they serve us, and on the other hand they control us.1 Computers, smartphones, and the infrastructure surrounding them now mediate much of our communications, affecting not only whom we can reach and who can reach us but also what we can say and what we […]