Hiring Student Graphic Designers: Benefits, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

This article explores the benefits and challenges of utilizing students as part-time employees to create graphic design materials for academic libraries' promotional needs. The authors describe their experience recruiting students through faculty recommendations, onboarding new hires, and the project management lifecycle for graphic design work.

Building Reflexivity Using Service Design Methods

The transformative potential of service design rests on its ability to enable people to intentionally shape institutionalized social structures. To avoid simply reproducing social structures unconsciously, people need reflexivity—an awareness of existing social structures. Scholars suggest that the use of service design methods can enhance people’s reflexivity. However, the theoretical underpinning of this effect remains unclear, which in turn limits the realization of service design’s transformative potential in practice. In response, using an abductive approach that combines theoretical and empirical inputs, we develop an integrative framework that explains the mechanisms by which service design methods can increase people’s reflexivity. The current study contributes to the evolving service design discourse with an alternative categorization of service design methods, based on their affordances for different modes of reflexivity. The framework also reveals the underlying processes by which the use of service design methods can support people’s work with institutionalized social structures as design materials to enable transformation. This research supports a more thoughtful use and strategic development of service design methods to support transformative aims.

Landscape after the battle

The author reviews the history of the birth of the master plan for the socialist city of Magnitogorsk in connection with new publications and new design materials. An attempt is made to expand the boundaries of the version of the competition for Soviet and German specialists, the value of all planning projects created in the 1929-1930s is highlighted, and the need for preservation and development of the quarter No. 1 of the Socialist City as a world famous urban planning monument is again pointed out.