Interactive Aesthetics (Interfaces)

Refereed Publications

  • Monographs 2

  • Edited Collections 2

  • Journal Articles 26

  • Chapters 14

  • Juried Exhibitions 18

  • Op-eds (evidence-based): 2

Impact (Quantitative measures)

Funding

  • ~225K in funding as PI

  • ~8M in funding as Co-PI

Select Honors

  • Scholarly distinctions 4

  • Best Poster Paper Award 1

  • Teaching Award 1

Presentations

  • Keynote 7

  • Invited 30

  • Refereed 30

  • Contributed 31

Audrey G. Bennett, a naturalized American scholar of Afro-Caribbean descent, is the 2022 AIGA Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary recipient; a 2019 inaugural University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor at the University of Michigan; a 2015 Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Scholar of the University of Pretoria, South Africa; and a 1997 College Art Association Professional Development Fellow.

As an graphic design scholar, theorist, and cultural critic, Bennett uses her hands, heart, mind, and heritage to engage in critical reading, writing, and thinking on social images towards transforming them with interactive aesthetics (IA). Her current research agenda diverges towards multiple lines of creative inquiry on the use of multimodal images whose visual and verbal language facilitate or evoke multisensory interaction with lay people to enable cross-cultural resonance and yield cognitive change, behavioral change, and more recently, socioeconomic change toward equity and "generative justice" (Eglash 2016).

Bennett conducts creative and theoretical research within Baohouse, a virtual design studio she founded circa 2005. Baohouse is an immaterial and motile collaborative research space, where she leads studies on how IA can engage lay people with socially and environmentally transformative images that use multimodal visual language to evoke multisensory user responses. In her early work, Bennett straddled research and creative practice, disseminating her findings via peer-reviewed publications for books and journals and artwork for juried exhibitions. Today, her work focuses on research with scholarly outputs disseminated primarily via peer-reviewed publications. Bennett’s key publications that introduce key findings include:

Bennett, A. 2012. “Follow the Golden Ratio from Africa to the Bauhaus for a Cross-Cultural Aesthetic for Images.” Critical Interventions 9 (10): 11-23. (Keywords: cultural grids, autochthonous black aesthetic, cross-cultural aesthetic)

Bennett, Audrey. “Ethnocomputational creativity in STEAM education: A cultural framework for generative justice” Teknocultura, Journal of Digital Culture and Social Movements, 13.2 (2016): 587-612. (Keywords: ethnocomputational creativity, heritage algorithms)

Bennett, Audrey. “ A Wicked Solution to the Global Food Problem” Iridescent: Icograda Journal of Design Research 2.3 (2013): 2-10. (Keyword: wicked solution)

Bennett, Audrey. “Interactive Aesthetics” Design Issues 18.3 (2002): 62-69. (Keyword: interactive aesthetics)

Bennett is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Image and Text (South Africa), New Design Ideas (Azerbaijan), and A2RU’s Groundworks Journal; and, she is a former member of the Executive Committee of the College Art Association, where she served as Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Currently, she serves as Development Chair on the Board of Directors of the AIGA Detroit chapter. 

Bennett holds an M.F.A. degree in graphic design from Yale University and a B.A. degree in studio art from Dartmouth College.

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