Author: sheilapontis
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Hello, My name is Sheila 🙂
This is not a post about creativity, design, or teaching. It is about identity. Despite, been borne and raised in a Spanish-speaking country, my parents chose an Irish (also commonly used in Australia) name – Sheila – and to use its English pronunciation; that is “Sheelagh.” It means Sky and also carries special meaning for…
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Explaining the value of a transdisciplinary practice
The Information Design & Critical Theory course examines various theoretical models of sensemaking, mapping, and visual communication intrinsic to information design that help students understand the broad scope of the practice, its goal, and value, as well as their ethical responsibilities, as practitioners who soon will join the workforce. Students unpack concepts through mapping assignments…
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Imagination, Well-being, & Happiness workshop!
Have you been struggling to think creatively or imagine alternative realities or solutions for a problem? Do you find it challenging to daydream or wonder? Would you like to learn techniques and strategies to help others – students, colleagues, team members – be more imaginative? Or simply want to learn more about imagination and creativity?…
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Creativity + Science Conversations
Despite the many challenges, COVID restrictions pushed society to explore new ways of doing familiar tasks that before had been truly unthinkable. One of these tasks was teaching: rethinking the traditional in-person modality of instruction brought many headaches and a big learning curve, but also opened the door to new opportunities, like being able to…
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The vicious cycle hindering Imagination & Creativity
While creativity has become a common word in most contexts – creative technologies, creative policy making, creative science, the role that imagination plays is mostly unspoken. Similarly, despite the increasing demand for imaginative ideas that could lead to innovation, such ideas, once generated and shared for support or approval, are often blocked and never developed.…
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Parsing out the Understanding Professions
Spring semester classes at the Information Design and Data Visualization Graduate programs started a few weeks ago. Being able to articulate what makes information design different from related fields is essential to anyone new coming into the practice, but this can be tricky because boundaries are blurring and practices, methods, and outputs often defy categorization.…
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Information Design Unbound: The process
Writing a book is not always an easy journey – at least this has been my experience with all my books. Here are some of the learnings from my last book. Information Design Unbound was initially conceived a long time ago and was in the making for over 6 years, during which COVID and other…
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Get your deck of Cards!
It has been more than 10 years since I developed the first version of MapCI Cards. The current version of the cards is the result of multiple rounds of user research that I have been conducting during the last decade. For instance, interviews and surveys helped me uncover designers’ overall problem-solving patterns and identify key…
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Book Launch Event!
This week is the official launch of our new book Information Design Unbound. Key Concepts and Skills for Making Sense in a Changing World! While technically a textbook, the book presents a practical, yet reflective approach to teaching and learning information design, where readers are encouraged to go develop awareness about their own way of…
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From Invention to Convention: Information Design Genres
Information design communicates through a combination of visible and invisible “rules” that are established formally through widespread standardization – such as taught at school, shown in books, prized at competitions – or informally through everyday reuse. Overtime, groups of information design outputs with demonstrated value that share established content and design rules – codes and…
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Creativity & Science: New Course for PhDs
Teaching creativity and helping people – of any age, background, and level of experience – reconnect with their imagination and creative potential is an extremely rewarding experience. Throughout the journey, people change their perception about external (what the concept means) and internal (their own) creativity and gain confidence in who they are and their ideas.…
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From Design to design
Last month, I was invited to open the 8th Forum for design educators in MĂ©xico. The forum was organized by COMAPROD, the evaluation body of design academic programs in the country, and the largest organizations of design schools: Encuadre (focused on Graphic Design programs) and DI-Integra (focused on Industrial Design programs). My talked provided a…
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