Art historian Woods wins grant from Graham Foundation.

Read More

When Kacey Hengesbach began her undergraduate career at Notre Dame, she didn’t imagine that it would include traveling 8,000 miles to Ahmedabad, India. But thanks to a new course created by Neeta Verma, she had the chance to spend three weeks there last summer, working collaboratively with students from India’s National Institute of Design. Hengesbach and the other students in Verma’s Social Design course continued their partnership with the NID students throughout the fall semester, hosting them for a two-week visit to Notre Dame in September and communicating via Skype and email for the remainder of the course.

Read More

Presentation at College Art Association’s Annual Conference, February 24, 2018, Los Angeles, CA

The Evolving Role of the Designer in the New Paradigm

Neeta Verma, Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame

Within the context of a world where many socio-economic challenges are becoming a shared predicament, the paper examines the evolving role of design/designers to understand how user-centric approaches have introduced research, testing, and validation to the design process. The emergence of web created a seismic shift in the 1990’s–it redefined the crucial role that users began to play in the redefinition of both industrial and visual communication design. Added to this shift, the rapid change of scale at which problems came to be defined, especially within societal contexts, made it imperative for designers to extend their approach beyond disciplinary skills to gaining a deeper understanding of the context within which they operate in an effort to create sustainable impact through design innovation. In this new ecology, in addition to serving as creatives by connecting ‘need’ to ‘gratification’, the role of the designer transformed to incorporate additional roles: that of being a collaborator, facilitator, catalyst, and co-creator.…

Read More