The New School / Parsons • Immersive Learning Curriculum Innovation Initiative
In Spring 2021, my Graphic Design History project was selected for The New School’s Immersive Learning Curriculum Innovation Initiative through the XReality Center. The project, Graphic Design History Immersion Rooms – Periods of Graphic Design and Student Galleries, explored how a design history course could move beyond the traditional lecture and learning-management-system format into an immersive virtual environment.
The central idea was to create a series of virtual rooms and gallery spaces based on periods of graphic design history. Graphic design does not develop independently of its time; it is shaped by technology, culture, politics, social change, and new forms of communication. The immersive environment was conceived as a way for students to enter those different visual worlds and experience historical material in a more spatial and connected way.
The Virtual Environment
The project began with the design of a central Welcome Lobby containing course information, a visual timeline, lecture material, images, video, and audio. From the lobby, students could move into individual spaces devoted to specific periods of design history, from early visual communication and printing through modernism and contemporary graphic design.
Each period gallery could combine lecture images, selected readings and PDFs, video, links to outside collections, and visual material from the course. The goal was not simply to reproduce a lecture in three dimensions, but to organize the material so students could move through it, make connections between periods, and encounter the work in a different context.
Student Work Inside the Environment
Student participation was built into the concept. Separate gallery spaces were developed for course projects and student research. The Periods of Design project asked students to select a historical design period and identify contemporary work that continued to use its visual language, layout, typography, or concepts. The Design Hero project asked students to research an influential designer and present biographical and visual material.
Rather than having that work exist only as an assignment submission, the immersive environment allowed student projects to become part of the course space itself. The galleries could function as places for viewing, discussion, critique, and presentation for both internal and external audiences.
From Sketch to Prototype
The project developed from hand-drawn planning sketches into a working virtual prototype. The early drawings mapped the Welcome Lobby, central information areas, individual period rooms, student galleries, and assignment spaces. These concepts were then translated into 3D environments containing course imagery, exhibition walls, graphic design history content, and student work.
The work became a proof of concept for using immersive technology as part of design-history teaching and for rethinking how course content, research, and student work could be organized and experienced in a shared virtual space.
This Graphic Design History course was also used as a course-design benchmark in New School Online Faculty Training.