For the past two years, Maryland Institute College of Art graphic design students have had a unique opportunity to work with The Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute (JHUHI) in the only collaboration in the nation of an art college and medical institution. MICA students in an advanced graphic design class led by Bernard Canniffe were engaged in the communication process to find effective ways of targeting an audience to promote awareness of research studies that JHUHI completed that has deeply ingrained skepticism of its largest institutional neighbor: Johns Hopkins. Tom O'Toole, of the JHUHI saw an opportunity to use this project to get valuable information into the hands of the community and improve relations with the School's neighbors to facilitate future initiatives to benefit the community.
The project is dedicated to geographically communicating critically important public health information to local communities in East Baltimore. Students in consultation with MICA faculty, JHUHI staff, and community leaders create communication vehicles and design approaches that effectively deliver carefully selected public health messages to specific community organizations and sites, depending on the target audience. Through an intensely collaborative process of developing innovative design solutions, students learn about major urban health issues, and the many challenges confronting underserved inner-city communities.
The goal of the first project in the 2001-2002 academic year was to create educational campaigns focusing on three issues raised by studies conducted by Johns Hopkins researchers focusing on African-American hypertension, the Dash Diet (a highly successful dietary approach to hypertension management), and child safety. MICA students worked closely with JHUHI and community leaders, including Leon Purnell, director of the well-respected Men's Center in East Baltimore, to create communication approaches that would be well-received by audiences in the School's neighborhood. The campaigns incorporated a wide array of communication vehicles, including logos, billboards, t-shirts, mugs, and even a fully equipped mobile education unit focused on child safety in the home. In addition to the graphic design elements, students also developed a 3-D computer model of the "safety bus." In the 2002-2003 academic year, students focused on the issue of childhood violence, and more specifically gun violence in the community. The upcoming course in the 2003-2004 academic year will focus on the issue of childhood lead poisoning.
Bernard Canniffe, a designer whose own work has been honored with the Graphis 2000 Design Award and featured in How magazine, observed, "I would stand behind any one of these individual designs that my students created for this project. The School of Urban Health obtained thinking comparable to that of an established agency from these groups of emerging designers." The CommunityCampus Partnerships for Health has just published a paper by Canniffe about the MICA/JHUHI collaboration.
MICA's graphic design program is led by internationally recognized graphic designer Ellen Lupton, and it is well-known in the Mid-Atlantic region as the alma mater of many of the region's most talented and successful designers. The College offers a bachelor of fine arts in graphic design and will launch a new master of fine arts program in graphic design in conjunction with the opening of the Brown Center, the College's new academic building to open in spring 2004.
One of the major goals of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute is to create an infrastructure both for Johns Hopkins and East Baltimore to help address the community's critical health needs. The partnership is intended to complement existing community outreach programs and services initiated by Johns Hopkins.
Maryland Institute College of Art celebrated its 175th anniversary in 2001 and has consistently been named among the nation's very top visual arts colleges. In addition to its academic standing, MICA is recognized throughout the Baltimore/Washington region as a cultural resource, sponsoring many public and community-outreach programs, including exhibitions, artists' residencies, film series, lectures, readings, and performances. Public programming at MICA will expand with the opening of Brown Center in 2003-2004, which features a performance space especially designed to feature work in digital media.
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