Kelly Murdoch-Kitt and Omar Sosa-Tzec recognized for Decipher 2018
Stamps Assistant Professors Kelly Murdoch-Kitt and Omar Sosa-Tzec were recently recognized by the Design Incubation Communication Design Educators Awards in the category of Service. The duo was nominated for their work in co-chairing and creating the Decipher 2018 Design Educators Research Conference, which was hosted by the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design in September 2018 in partnership with DARIA, the Design As Research in the Americas Network, and the AIGA Design Educators Community (AIGA DEC).
Since their inaugural competition in 2016, the Design Incubation Communication Design Educators Awards annually recognize excellence in the areas of teaching, creative works, published research, and scholarship. The awards aim to showcase “excellence and ingenuity in the academic study of design” among submissions from teaching or research faculty at accredited institutions that offer communication design.
The service award recognizes many different types of contributions to the discipline of design. Murdoch-Kitt and Sosa-Tzec worked diligently to bring the Decipher 2018 Design Educators Research Conference to U‑M. Through careful planning and sensitive execution, their conference was inclusive experience across multiple dimensions, including research expertise, the industry/practice continuum, cultural backgrounds, and different orientations toward design research.
In parallel with planning the conference, Murdoch-Kitt worked with the AIGA Design Educators Community and Michigan Publishing Services to establish a long-term publishing relationship for conference proceedings of the AIGA DEC. To acknowledge the relationship with the AIGA DEC’s biannual design journal, Dialectic, this series of proceedings is called Dialogue.
The proceedings of the Decipher 2018 conference were the first AIGA DEC conference proceedings to be published by Michigan Publishing, and are available in two open-access online volumes: