Research & Creative Activity

My professional engagement & scholarly research continues to thrive. My work can best be grouped into two areas: 1) the application of strategic thinking for large scale branding, marketing and engagement, 2) the application of design thinking and transition design approaches to large systemic societal problems (“wicked problems”) in the hopes to create a more sustainable future through the creation of broader impacts in scholarly research.

Academically, I continue to apply design thinking and trasitional design processes to scholarly NIH and NSF research as a faculty collaborator. Transitional Design acknowledges that we live in society is undergoing large systems-level transition and argues that designers need to play a key role in the process. Transitional Design is complementary to, and borrows from, other design approaches such as design for good, design for social change and design thinking.

I continue my social activism work by designing and curating the Nebraska Appleseed Art + Justice Poster Show. It is widely believed that many of our anti-drug laws have racially disfavored African Americans and low-income communities. While recent bipartisan legislation begins to reform some of the sentencing laws that have wrongly and disproportionately harmed African-Americans – my poster, “A Threat to Justice” is a call to action, a reminder, and a rally for America to remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. words, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” My poster this year, “A Threat to Justice” won a Gold Medal and the Judge’s Choice Award at the AIGA Nebraska Show Design Competition.

As the Communication Director for the Rural Drug Addiction Research Center (RDAR) we had a tremendous amount of work to do in our first year of the grant. We created brand identities for RDAR and well as the Rural Health Cohort (RHC). We launched a rich website featuring news, events and grant opportunities. We tied in all social media with a YouTube page, Facebook page, and Twitter stream. In November we hosted our first National Conference on Drug Addiction at the Wick Alumni Center. We had guest speakers from across the country as well as across the Midwest. We held a networking dinner in the Elephant room of Morrill Hall. We had approximately 100 attend the conference. All communications were done through MailChimp and across our digital channels. In addition, we host a monthly seminar in the new RDAR conference room. All seminars are promoted and recorded so that healthcare providers from across the state can attend all talks. The talks are then placed on UNL’s Media Hub and on our RDAR YouTube channel. Site: rdar.unl.edu