City branding involves establishing unique identities for cities using branding principles. While Johannesburg and Cape Town are among Africa's best-branded cities, their branding strategies were largely top-down, lacking collaborative stakeholder engagement. In the wake of the global pandemic that severely impacted tourism, there is an urgent need to revise these strategies through a co-creative approach.

In South Africa, city branding activities can benefit the local tourism sector, which was severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with strict lockdown measures leading to a standstill in tourism activities throughout 2020 and 2021. As restrictions eased and businesses in the sector aimed to revive tourism, innovative approaches became necessary.

Ubuntu philosophy is based on the premise that umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person because of other people). Ubuntu emphasises empathy, respect, and sensitivity as core tenets. Ubuntu principles are part of the teaching philosophy of Design for Social Change (DSC) that we use in our visual communication design course at a university of technology in South Africa. This teaching philosophy seeks to find solutions that will not only foster aesthetically pleasing and functional creative outputs from students but will also address the root causes of social problems and empower communities to create change that is enduring and sustainable.

This study aimed to identify the measures taken by a large international advertising company to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, and how these measures could be applied to design education. We interviewed a senior business partner of the company and determined the measures they took and their business variables affected by the pandemic. The results show how the pandemic affected interaction between design professionals; how they develop and present their creative solutions and how they brainstorm, collaborate, and remain inspired. The company will not be returning to their previous way of operating, and neither do they see the need to do so.

Scholarship has many dimensions, such as the scholarship of research/discovery; the scholarship of integration, application, and teaching; and the scholarship of public and democratic engagement where knowledge is co-constructed. These broader notions of scholarship challenge the traditional understanding of a university and position scholars and researchers in a broader socio-economic, historical, and cultural context. Design as a field developed and widened as a result of new challenges and opportunities – for example the fourth industrial revolution – and changes in the discipline.

The study qualitatively explored the local communication-design-education landscape and identified the structures, nature, challenges and role players. Theoretical models with the potential to guide the development of postgraduate design education were analysed. These are the Mode 1, 2 and 3 models, Innovation Triple, Quadruple and Quintuple Helix models, as well as research approaches that have the potential to better align academia with industry, such as practice-based and practice-led research, recognition of prior learning and work-integrated learning.

Following a query in 2018 by the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) alumni office to establish in which industries or companies UJ alumni were predominantly employed, information was gathered by members of the department of Graphic Design and data accumulated on a large number of alumni from the Department of Graphic Design.

Typography is constantly shifting its form according to technologies and audiences. Understanding the constant motions of typography is critical in designing forms of visual communication. In addition, current digital technologies provide novel opportunities for users to participate and co-create new typographic conventions. Online ‘fandoms’ consist of communities with interests in cultural phenomena, ranging from fan art to celebrities, to artefacts. Fandoms are an example of user-generated content with strong typographic shifts.

This paper reports on the use of object biography writing as a method for Communication Design students to construct knowledge in the Design Studies classroom. Students used a guideline constructed around the stages of the birth, life and death of an object to write an object biography on a mass-manufactured object of their own choice with a focus on how the object is used by individuals to construct and express gender identity.

Child-orientated sugary breakfast cereals are a prominent product feature in the dry goods section of supermarkets. Scholars in health sciences and marketing have reported on these products’ poor nutritional value and how marketers appeal to children through the use of persuasive television advertising and packaging design. This study presents a visual thematic content analysis of child- orientated breakfast cereal packaging available in local supermarkets. The results indicated that South African marketers use “friendly” and “welcoming” cartoon characters as the most prominent graphic element on breakfast cereal packaging.

Viktor Papanek, in his seminal book about ethics and design, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology  and  Social  Change (1971,  revised  1984)  declares  that  designers  share  responsibility  for humankind’s environmental mistakes, by all the products and tools that they have sold and created, either by bad design or by turning a blind eye (1984, p. 56).

The majority of institutional ethics committees at South African tertiary institutions state in their standard operating procedures that the role of the ethics committee includes screening proposed research with regard to the core principles of ethics (dignity and autonomy, justice, non-maleficence and beneficence), as well as the scientific validity of the envisaged study.  

The first part of this paper debates to what extent such an approach is justified, as the notion of validity is primarily located in the philosophy of science and not in the field of moral philosophy.  

The second part of the paper illustrates some of the main points of the discussion with selected examples from the field of visual communication design research.

The examples are drawn from

Wicked problems are wicked because, amongst other things, understanding problems as existing in society, at the intersection of many possible points of views held by a variety of potential stakeholders introduces indeterminacy. Ethical frameworks in this context may also be multiple and may exist in harmony or dis-harmony alongside each other.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) methods have been identified as valuable and effective approaches to designing with and for people, but is also due to complexity and indeterminacy, often difficult to practice. With the popularisation of HCD in contemporary design education, and the subsequent emphasis of human-centered research an ethical question arises as to whether design students are adequately prepared to engage with the type of research that more and more they are expected to conduct.

Objectification imparts harm to women and sets a detrimental precedent for self-objectification. This is particularly true for young women who are seeking information to assist them in the process of identity construction. Experimental studies indicate that objectification in media causes negative body esteem, an unnecessary drive for thinness, eating disorders and related psychological problems. Globalised media trends emphasise and value women for their physical appearance. These trends de- personalise women, depict them as objects to be gazed at, and style them as decorative, rather than a person with a mind, aptitude, intellect, personality and a ‘voice’.

In this paper, the authors present information needs required by caregivers in a resource-constrained community during their health-education activities with considerations to design ethics. The role of visuals and technology in facilitating health communication, the need to design “with” users and the benefits thereof are discussed.

South Africa finds itself in the difficult position of not having a truly representative voice for design practice. Furthermore, we find ourselves without an advertising regulator with legislative support or legal force with a view on ensuring ethical and non-harmful design practice. The closest we come to such a body, is our advertising self-regulator, namely the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa (ASASA).

In 2012 the Melville Community Development Organisation (MCDO) approached the Department of Strategic Communications at the University of Johannesburg for a collaboration between the University and the Melville community, with the support of the Melville Residence Association (MRA). These Melville institutions requested groups of Honours students to research and propose a solution for the urban degeneration within the area, as perceived by its businesses, tourists and residents.

Full Title: A reflexive account of developing community health care material through the use of pre-testing methods and visual persuasion techniques

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is a congenital syndrome caused by excessive consumption of alcohol by a mother during pregnancy. It is characterized by retardation of mental development and physical growth, particularly of the skull and face of the infant. FAS is a growing problem in South Africa, with it being rife in the townships and rural areas. The lack of public information and intervention is one of the reasons why the syndrome persists in these communities and this was also the motivation for this study.

Jacob  Dlamini,  in  his  seminal  text  ‘Native  nostalgia’  (2010),  confides  that  the  first  time  he  heard  the  term ‘economic  sanctions’  used in the township  was in the early 1980s when he woke up one day to discover the local Barclays Bank had been renamed First National Bank (FNB). Notably, Dlamini continues to list “a bottle store and … the biggest news agent in Katlehong” as signifiers of urban life of Katlehong, but only the bank is recalled by brand. At the time, the re‐branding of Barclays engendered a storm of protest in South Africa, both in design circles, and amongst members of the public.

The paper deals with issues and concerns relating to the process of pre-­‐testing visual  illustrations used in educational material in a community communication setting.

The first part of the paper discusses  how selected aspects of nutrition education materials meant for elderly care givers in Boipatong  were pre-­‐tested using questionnaires (n=55) and focus group discussions in order to establish the  target group’s views and opinions about different types of visual illustration approaches. The  information was subsequently used to guide the production of a visually illustrated nutrition  education booklet, which was distributed free of charge in the community as part of a nutrition  education intervention.