Emerging Technology Statement:
The history of communication and design is a story of technological disruption. From Gutenberg’s movable type in the 1450s to the steam-driven presses of the Industrial Revolution, and from the desktop publishing explosion of the 1980s to the rise of networked environments, algorithms, and artificial intelligence—each era forces a structural shift in how we create and connect.
Across this long arc, what binds these moments together is how society learns to adapt. Crucially, this adaptation is not passive compliance, but a critical response that demands friction. Friction is not a bug in adaptation; it is the engine. As summarized in a recent dialogue on media theory and systems design, “resistance provides the feedback loop that informs a system how it needs to change. Without friction, there is no signal—only inertia.”
In the spirit of this current moment of disruption, the Communication Design & Strategy department is committed to navigating this friction with you. AI is already embedded in the digital world around us—from navigation and commerce to the creative software and gaming systems we use daily. Ignoring it is not an option, but surrendering to it isn’t either.
To guide our community, we commit to the following principles:
- Maintain Creative Agency
- Be both a tool-user and a tool-maker. Remain open to emerging technology, but stay confident in your own capacity to build, shape, and challenge the tools you use.
- Augment, don’t replace. Evaluate AI before adopting it. Use it thoughtfully across research and discovery as an aid to amplify human insight, never as a substitute for it.
- Protect authorship and ethics. Respect creative labor by avoiding prompts that directly scrape or mimic specific artists’ names, signature styles, or historical periods.
- Create Transparency & Community
- Document your process. Cite how and where AI tools are integrated into your work, sharing what you learn—and where the friction lies—along the way.
- Set collaborative boundaries. When working in teams, establish clear ground rules for tool usage early on. Address ethical, communication, or quality concerns professionally, and rely on faculty to help navigate complex challenges when needed.
- Set personal boundaries. Ultimately, no one in the department will force you to use AI tools. You have full agency and choice—though it is worth recognizing that you may already be using AI in your daily workflow without realizing it.
- Cultivate the Skills of the Future
- Technical tools will continue to evolve, but your enduring value as a designer relies on human depth:
- Understand History: Visual culture is born out of human needs, technological shifts, and social changes. Frame your work in where we’ve been, to anticipate the future.
- Cultivate Taste: Cultivate curiosity. Look beyond comfortable algorithms. Dig deep into context, nuance, and unexpected influences. Aesthetics did not happen in a vacuum.
- Lead with High EQ: Expand your soft skills. Be an empathetic listener, an honest writer, and a critical thinker. Practice self-compassion, build resilience, and hold yourself and others respectfully accountable.
- Make Space for Others: True collaboration requires emotional intelligence—whether in the classroom, the studio, or the boardroom.
Bibliography of Media & Design Disruption
READ
1. Tschichold, Jan. (1928). Die neue Typographie: Ein Handbuch für zeitgemäss Schaffende [The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers]. Berlin: Verlag des Bildungsverbandes der Deutschen Buchdrucker.
Summary: A modernist design manifesto reacting directly to the Industrial Era. Tschichold outlines how machine production, photography, and standardized printing techniques demand a radical shift from symmetrical serif layouts to functional, asymmetric sans-serif design.
2. Mumford, Lewis. (1934). Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Summary: A foundational history of technology that argues machines did not just change physical production, but restructured human perception and social order—tracing how mechanisms like the mechanical clock standardized time, space, and modern visual organization.
3. McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Summary: Introduces the core concept that “the medium is the message,” arguing that technological media (radio, print, television) act as physical extensions of human senses and re-engineer culture regardless of explicit content.
4. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Summary: The definitive historical study on the transition from manuscript culture to movable-type printing, detailing how standardized typography and mass distribution catalyzed the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.
5. Postman, Neil. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking Penguin.
Summary:: Documents the shift from a print-dominated culture (built on linear logic, text, and deliberate reading) to a television-dominated culture (driven by imagery, speed, and entertainment), analyzing the resulting degradation of public discourse.
6. Kittler, Friedrich A. (1986). Grammophon, Film, Typewriter [Gramophone, Film, Typewriter]. Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose.
Summary: A milestone in German media theory showing how 19th-century technical devices severed the monopoly of written script by separating human sensory processing into distinct media streams: sound (gramophone), visual motion (film), and standardized text (typewriter).
7. Aldersey-Williams, Hugh, Lorraine Wild, Lupton Ellen, and Cranbrook Academy of Art. (1990). Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse. New York: Rizzoli International Publications.
Summary: Captures the visual revolution brought on by the personal computer in the late 1980s. It showcases how graphic designers at Cranbrook used early Macintosh systems to deconstruct traditional typographic grids and pioneer digital post-modernism.
8. Manovich, Lev. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Summary: Maps out a unified theory of digital interfaces, showing how computer software relies on historical visual conventions—tracing a direct line from early film editing and photographic manipulation to modern screen design, databases, and UI/UX.
9. Galloway, Alexander R. (2012). The Interface Effect. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Summary: Offers a critical media analysis of the user interface (UI), demonstrating that digital interfaces are not neutral surfaces or mere tools, but political and ideological filters through which we perceive data.
10. Johnson, Steven, (2015) How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, Riverhead Books
Summary: In this illustrated history, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to their unintended historical consequences. Filled with surprising stories of accidental genius and brilliant mistakes that led to unexpected innovations.
11. Atkinson, Harriet, Grace Lees-Maffei, and Kjetil Fallan, eds. (2019). Design, History and Time: New Approaches. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
Summary: Examines how shifting industrial processes, real-time digital communication, and changing speeds of production actively dictate visual styles and design methodologies across eras.
12. Zuboff, Shoshana. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs.
Summary: Explores the modern algorithmic era, detailing how major technology platforms transformed user interfaces and digital design into systems engineered for behavioral extraction and continuous screen engagement.
WATCH
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson, PBS TV
The Secret History of Writing, Linda Wilson, BBC TV
Steven Fry & the Guttenberg Press, Steven Fry, YouTube
The Media is the Message, Marshall McLuhan, YouTube
The McLuhan Video, Marshall McLuhan, YouTube
PERIODICALS/ ARTICLES
John Ruskin Grandfather of the Maker Movement, Andrew Sleigh, Medium, 2015
John Ruskin and the Climate: The Storm Cloud and the Anthropocene, Francesca Orestano, 2024
48 Hours Without AI, NYTimes, October 28, 2025
AI Is Still A Reproduction Machine, R. Wiley Evans, Medium, July, 2026
If You Are Over 40, You’re Ready to Use A.I. // Debbie Millman, NY Times, July 27, 2026
For more on Ruskin (Stones of Venice, 1851), look at the discourse between him and Henry Cole (Journal of Design and Manufactures, 1849) at the height of the Industrial Revolution.
NOTE:
This policy was drafted by humans, edited for spelling and grammar by Gemini, re-reviewed and further edited by humans, and then massaged for consistent tone by Gemini. The humans also used their own historical knowledge to create the bibliography of reading and watching, however Google searches helped to fill in the context.