Pamela Pease, a Ph.D. candidate and design educator at North Carolina State University, and Dr. Meredith Davis, Professor of Graphic and Industrial Design at North Carolina State University, are the recipients of this year’s $7,500 award for their proposal titled “Design pedagogy as a strategy for teaching and learning creative risk-taking.” Belinda Haikes, an Assistant Professor of Art (Interactive Design) at West Chester University is the recipient of this year’s $2,500 award for her proposal titled “Linked Lives.”

Doctoral candidate Pease and Dr. Davis will use their funds to facilitate case study research that examines how K-12 teachers in North Carolina who have been trained to incorporate design thinking into their pedagogic approaches might create and sustain learning situations in their classrooms that encourage creative risk-taking, as well as thought processes that guide innovation and invention. Professor Haikes will use her funds to facilitate a community-based, applied design research project in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It will help her and a small team of interdisciplinary researchers determine the most efficacious methods to disseminate information about soil toxicity and its potential effects on neighborhood populations in select areas of Philadelphia.

The process of reviewing and evaluating this year’s array of proposals required seeking and coordinating evaluations from 42 reviewers who are members of graphic, visual communications or interaction design faculties at 33 institutions of higher learning in the U.S. and Canada. This process was followed by the national steering committee of the AIGA DEC engaging in a comprehensive examination and assessment of the commentary received from all external reviewers. Once this was completed, a comparative analysis of the entire array of proposals was produced, which resulted in the final determination of awardees.

The national steering committee of the AIGA DEC issues a call for proposals for its Design Faculty Research grants in early October each year. The deadline for receipt of these proposals is 11:59 pm CST on December 31. The AIGA DEC awards one grant in the amount of $7,500 during the following April/May, and one grant in the amount of $2,500 at the same time. Full- and part-time graphic design, visual communication design and interaction design faculty from North America are eligible to apply for these grants. Only proposals that seek to fund inquiry-based research endeavors are eligible to receive funding.