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Browsing by Author "Ruiz, Adolfo"

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    A designer's guide to internationalization and localization of design
    (2024) Onwudinjo, Jennifer; Ruiz, Adolfo
    The Diversity and Adaptability Composition Test (DACT) booklet is a test established to assess the effectiveness of a proposed design. A design must pass the DACT by satisfying a set of checkboxes, questions, and requirements. This test serves as a guiding assessment tool, examining designs to ensure they follow its principles of diversity, inclusion, and adaptability. The DACT aims to create a standard for evaluating how well designs engage a variety of audiences while honouring cultural diversity by outlining precise criteria.
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    DESN 315 P3 Stories from the future
    (2022) Nguyen, Kevin; Ruiz, Adolfo
    A series of illustrations depicting a narrative set in a dystopian future.
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    A place we call home: curriculum for land-based education
    (2022) Ruiz, Adolfo
    This paper describes initial research into the creation of curriculum that combines visual communication design with local Indigenous knowledge in the Tłıchǫ ̨ Dene region of subarctic Canada. This curriculum is intended for regional youth, and to be accredited by the Faculty of Extension at the University of Alberta. Situated outside dominant models of design education, the following sections illustrate the significant role that embodied knowledge and relationality can play in land-based pedagogy. As part of this discussion, the field of design is situated as an intermediary between an Indigenous community and a Western academic institution. Through a reflexive, narrative form of writing, the following sections provide an account of consultations between the principal investigator and Tłıchǫ ̨ community members during the early stages of research in 2019. Consultation during this time led to the creation of two curriculum drafts that are presented in the following pages.
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    (Re)storying empathy in design thinking
    (2023) Strickfaden, Megan; Ruiz, Adolfo; Thomas, Joyce
    Storytelling can be associated with temporality, memory, emotion, embodied ways of individually experiencing life, and social ways of collectively experiencing the world. Storytelling is also a kind of re-storying of human experience that has the potential to drive design solutions in very significant directions. We believe that storytelling has the potential to be a cornerstone towards breaking down assumptions about others and revealing beliefs and values about the people that designers call their users or audiences; and as such, storytelling can be significant to human-centred design processes and towards building empathy in design thinking. This paper highlights some of the central ideas around storytelling, re-storying and empathy from the fields of design studies, contemporary literature, psychology, and philosophy. This includes explorations into how designers invest time into storytelling and how this can lead towards deepening empathy and understanding of others’ circumstances. Our core assumption is that storytelling and re-storying are key ways to connect one person with another and to bring together groups of people through sharing and exploring details about individual experiences including intimate and emotional qualities of the human condition. Moving from our highlighted core concepts we put these to work through three projects created by authors and presented as case studies to better understand temporality, memory, emotion and embodiment, and to explore how empathy can be enacted. The three case studies are: a self-knowing activity called Embodied Maps; an activity that has been made into a short film called Evolving Lines; and an ethnographic film created to explore low vision and the urban environment called Light in the Borderlands. Each of these case studies are examples of different types of re-storying, woven together to shed light on and facilitate deep reflection and meaningful conversations about oneself and among people who carry distinct cultural knowledge and disparate lived experiences. Storytelling and re-storying in each of these case studies are developed through sustained and respectful dialogue over hours, weeks, and months as part of design inquiries leading to and facilitating meaning-making processes. This paper promises to illuminate how storytelling and re-storying can be used as a means to being a more empathic design thinker and move towards innovative design solutions that are more suitable, functional and, ultimately, valuable to people.
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    Story in motion: creative collaborations on Tłı̨chǫ lands
    (2023) Ruiz, Adolfo; Rabesca, Tony
    This exposition describes a creative collaboration in the self-governed Tłı̨chǫ region of Canada’s Northwest Territories. As part of this collaboration, Indigenous research methods and participatory experiences facilitated a process by which regional oral history was visualised and translated into animation. As a long-term project, this research was based on relationships through which a non-Indigenous researcher was able to learn and exchange knowledge with elders and youth from the region. Community workshops facilitated image-making, storytelling sessions, and interaction between generations. The animated film that emerged through this research is an embodiment of cultural knowledge and cultural continuity.