Panel
 In this panel, educators, a librarian, and students explore diverse encounters with original source materials and artifacts from design history, primarily through digital tools and environments. Pedagogically, these encounters were designed to inform the contexts in which emergent practitioners conceptualize their disciplinary studio-making practices. In conversation, we’ll reflect on the following questions: • How does a “primarily digital” process complement and complicate physical experiences with designed objects and images? • What are brief examples from your praxis showing how we use digital tools to experience, interpret, and critically re-present the material of design and its history? • How do digital archives connect research and practice? Highlighting the rewards of cross-disciplinary collaboration, a special collections librarian and a design educator discuss their work with design students. As research for an information design project, students visited the archives to see physical examples of data visualization and learn about digital tools for archiving data and objects. They explored Rowher Reconstructed, an online environment designed for experiencing 3D renderings of Japanese-American internment camp buildings in Arkansas, and leveraged their insights to develop a conceptual framework for ethical design engagement with marginalized communities. Reflecting on their work with a design history professor, two MFA students with prior professional experience discuss their archival research and its connections to their studio practice. As part of an educational research fellowship, a nascent letterpress printer sourced, digitally captured, and cataloged open-source images from printers’ manuals, type specimens, and histories of printing, produced 1683-1924. These images will be used to construct a graphic timeline for a book on the type specimen’s history, underway by the supervising professor. During a semester-long project on creating “recuperative parallel narratives” of graphic design history, the second student researched the artifacts of feminist design, interrogating the differences between traditional archives (rich in metadata) and informal digital repositories (housing frequently-excluded designs and designers).