Through writing and studio work, Jessica Barness focuses on critical practices, participatory projects, and the design of scholarship, and how these relate to issues of power and representation. She is also a designer of visual, interactive, and sound-based things. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University.
Barness has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as The Design Journal, Design and Culture, MATLIT: Materialidades da Literatura, and Dialectic. She has presented work at venues hosted by organizations such as AIGA, Design History Society, FILE Electronic Language Festival, HASTAC, and ICDHS. Her creative endeavors have garnered awards from entities such as the College Book Art Association and the STA 100. She is a recipient (with collaborator Amy Papaelias) of the Design Incubation Educators Communication Design Award in the category of Scholarship: Published Research.
She has an MFA in Design with a graduate minor in Writing Studies from the University of Minnesota, and a BA and MA in Studio Art from the University of Northern Iowa. Previously, she was a designer and researcher with Conway+Schulte Architects in Minneapolis, MN, and practiced professionally as a senior product designer and design development manager in Chicago, IL.
My article co-authored with Amy Papaelias, Readable, Serious, Traditional: Investigating Scholarly Perceptions of the Visual Design and Reading Experiences of Academic Journals, is published in the winter 2021 issue of She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation.
Project Co-Collage Remix, co-authored with Steven McCarthy, is selected for the juried exhibition All Together Now: Sound x Design at the Design Museum of Chicago, Nov 13, 2021 – April 3, 2022.
Our dialogue (Amy Papaelias, Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, Mike Zender, and myself) Turning Points: Publishing Visual Research in Design and Anthropology is published in Visual Anthropology Review (online first, 1 December 2021).
Presented Design Debates, Reader Voices, and the Histories within Design Blogs at the Design History Society annual conference, Memory Full. September 2021.
Two co-authored white papers focused on peer review are published on Design Incubation (January 2021): Basics of Peer Review for Design Scholarship and Advice to Authors Navigating Peer Review.
My article Inquiries on the Everyday Online Conversations of Design: Typologies, Comments, and Threads is published in The Design Journal (online first, 12 November 2020).
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