TRACES
Teaching-as-Research
GD 303 Applied Experience Design Studio, Penn State
2026
Can a studio assignment function as shared research between instructor and students, where each investigates their own lineage through a common visual system?
Traces is a six-week studio assignment designed for junior-level Experience Design students at Penn State. Students develop a single project that exists in three connected forms: a one-page interactive website, a printable poster, and a small artist book. Beginning from the word traces, students gather photographs and move through weekly exercises in alt-text writing, composition, motion, and book-making to investigate how a single visual system translates across print, screen, and bound page.
The assignment is structured as shared inquiry. Alongside students, I develop my own project with the same word prompt. Working in parallel reframes the instructor's role from authority to co-investigator, and tests whether teaching itself can be a site of research.
The assignment moves from language to image to form. Students begin with Alt-Text as Poetry exercises, using description as a way to slow attention to images they have gathered. Description gives way to composition [text-led, image-led, and symbol-led poster studies] which then translates into a one-page website where motion and interaction reveal what print cannot. The artist book comes last, asked to do what the poster and website cannot: hold sequence, fragment, or archive.
Working alongside students changes how the assignment is taught. Critique becomes a conversation between practitioners rather than evaluation from above.
A six-week studio sequence moving from alt-text writing and image study through poster composition, web interaction, and artist book development. Weekly exercises feed directly into final deliverables: one-page website, printable poster, and artist book sharing a single visual system.
My own Traces project, developed in parallel with students. Botanical imagery from Kerala, British-colonial words embedded in Indian English, and typewriter typography are gathered as material. The work investigates inherited language and place as forms of trace, and tests the assignment from inside.
My own Traces project, developed in parallel with students. Botanical imagery from Kerala, British-colonial words embedded in Indian English, and typewriter typography are gathered as material. The work investigates inherited language and place as forms of trace, and tests the assignment from inside.
Traces argues that the studio assignment can be a site of shared research, not a vehicle for delivering predetermined outcomes. When the instructor practices alongside students, the classroom shifts from a hierarchy of expertise to a community of investigators working on related questions. The assignment also argues that translation across media — print, screen, book — is not a technical exercise but a methodological one: each form imposes its own rules of attention, and what survives translation reveals what the work is actually about.
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress; co-investigator pedagogy
Set in Jetbrains
Created in Framer
© Anjana Padmakumar