Michael Gibson

Michael R. Gibson, Associate Professor, Communication Design

He is a tenured member of the Communication Design faculty at The University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design (UNT CVAD). Since July of 2009, he has held UNT CVAD’s post of graduate programs coordinator in Design with a Concentration in Design Research. The core courses in this program are facilitated at the Design Research Center. Prior to assuming this position, Associate Professor Gibson worked closely with his colleagues Keith Owens and Eric Ligon to develop and gain university and state-based Board of Higher Education approval for the instantiation of the DRC and for the graduate programs it would service. He began his career as a full-time, university-level Communication Design educator in the fall of 1994 at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) after earning an MFA in Graphic Design with a minor in Design Research from the University of Michigan in 1993. He began teaching at UNT CVAD in the fall of 1998. Gibson has presented widely on his research and scholarship in and around improving the facilitation of design education from middle-school through graduate-level study at juried venues such as the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA’s) Design Education Conference Series (11 times), the College Art Association (CAA’s) Design Sessions (6 times), the Design Research Society (DRS’) International Conference (once), and The International Institute for Information Design (IIID) International Conference (twice). His material in his discipline’s scholarly journals that examines how the learning experiences of students who must learn to abet their design processes with digital technology has appeared in Visible Language, The Information Design Journal, and Design Education in Progress, among others. He has managed a strategic design consultancy since 1987, which has afforded him numerous opportunities to attempt to bridge the divide between the practical demands of professional practice and the need to account for how the results of design processes affect and are affected by a broad spectrum of social, technological, economic, environmental and political issues. His original and applied research projects have addressed issues in children's and women's health, media ethics, the introduction of design processes in middle-school and high-school settings, the application of select theoretical approaches (failure analysis, activity theory, actor network theory) to improve interaction and user experience design, and freshwater conservation.