Jessica is a design scholar and a scholarly designer. Currently, she is a Professor in the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University, where she teaches design research, interaction design, and design writing.
Before academia, she worked as a designer and researcher in Minneapolis and Chicago, and those experiences shape how she studies the field today. Her scholarship examines the visual and material culture of design discourse itself — how design writing, publishing, and collage-based approaches shape the way the discipline understands its own history and practice. These inquiries started with projects like WYSi-WE (What You See is What Emerged) and articles such as “First Issues, First Words: Vision in the Making” (AIGA Dialectic) and “Designing the Emigre Magazine Index: Theory and Practice in an Alternative Research Tool” (Design and Culture). She co-edited a special issue of Visible Language, Critical Making: Design and the Digital Humanities, and her work has appeared in venues ranging from the Design Museum of Chicago to the Letterform Archive lecture series.
Her essay "Design Debates, Reader Voices, and the Histories within Design Blogs" (Design History Society) grew out of a curiosity about how communities form around design writing — a thread that continues in her current book project, Everyday Graphic Design Writing: Letters, Blogs, and the Making of Communities (under contract with Bloomsbury). She was a 2025 Writing Space Design Writing Fellow, and maintains a monthly newsletter, The Quiet Design Scholar.
© Jessica Barness