Professor of Art and Design and University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor at the University of Michigan
About
Audrey Bennett is a former Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Scholar of the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and a former College Art Association Professional Development Fellow. Currently, she is a tenured professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan where teaches and conducts research in design. She studies the user-centered design of multimodal and intersensory images for communication across cultures. Her research publications include: How Design Education Can Use Generative Play to Innovate for Social Change (International Journal of Design); Engendering Interaction with Images (Intellect/University of Chicago Press); The Rise of Research in Graphic Design (PAPress); Interactive Aesthetics (Design Issues); Good Design is Good Social Change (Visible Language). She is the co-editor of the Icograda Design Education Manifesto 2011, and a member of the Editorial Boards of the journals Image and Text (South Africa), Communication Design: Interdisciplinary and Graphic Design Research (Canada), and New Design Ideas (Azerbaijan). She holds an MFA in graphic design from Yale University.
Current Work:
Audrey Bennett is a graphic design scholar who studies cross-cultural and trans-disciplinary design that make use of images that permeate global culture and impact the way we think and behave. In her book, Engendering Interaction with Images, she argues that engendering user interaction with images improves their communicative effectiveness by enabling them to convey meanings effectively across cultures. Bennett writes:
"No longer passive spectators of images, these days we are more likely to be active participants in their production, distribution, and consumption. This phenomenon raises important questions about the consequences widespread user interaction may have on meaning, communicative effectiveness, and society at large."
Her research contributes a hypothesis called interactive aesthetics that aims to democratize control of images in society. Interactive aesthetics (IA) explains the use of technology to place designers in virtual collaboration with lay users, where technology makes it easier for remote participants in various stages of the design process to work together. Bennett currently conducts fieldwork globally to investigate the use of interactive aesthetics to affect social change. Her interactive aesthetics research agenda includes two primary strands of inquiry. First, Bennett studies the use of IA in the prevention of new HIV infections in Kenya and Ghana (funded by the National Science Foundation). Second, she investigates the use of interactive aesthetics towards ethnically and intellectually diversifying STEM education, particularly computer science, with indigenous art curricula (funded by the National Science Foundation and Google).
Research Area Keyword(s):
Diversifying stem, human subjects research, cross-cultural communication, interactive aesthetics
