Erin Sledd

  

University professor and graphic designer, Erin Sledd works at the intersection of the humanities, art and technology. Her research and creative interests span the connections between the analog and digital world and include mythology and fairytales, metamorphoses and hybridity, cognitive science, emergent design, virtual and material structures, gamification and user experience design, narrative, computational linguistics, and eschatechnology.

Both as a designer and academic, she is fascinated by the nature of form and structure, of transformation and permutation. She has a profound and abiding interest in the digital information revolution that is profoundly changing our experience of ourselves and our cultures, and a fascination with the nature of change itself, particularly in the effect of rate and scale on both the nature ane effects of change.

As a professor Erin Sledd designs courses tailored to the population she instructs. She endeavors to develop both practical, applied skills and theoretical, creative approaches to the subjects she teaches with the goal of developing her students’ knowledge base in the subject matter, their ability to critically and creatively analyze, and an awareness of cross-disciplinary approaches to problems and ideas.

As an artist she draws from a well of knowledge in literature, images, history and science to create designs that surprise and delight. Often ornamental and intricate, her work is nevertheless firmly conceptual in origin, reflecting her conviction that compelling design is rooted in meaning. She is fascinated by the oddly ephemeral, yet tangible and pervasive nature of graphic design. She loves designing for print and reproduction because, in a sense, each image is the original. As Fornassetti said, "A thing does not become less beautiful because it is reproduced 20,000 to 30,000 times."