EXHIBITION DESCRIPTION:

The 2026 Capstone, TRACEWORK, invites graduating designers to explore the theme of legacy — the cultural, social, environmental, and personal imprints that shape our present and inform our future. These legacies can be inherited, celebrated or contested, visible or invisible. They live in traditions, stories, artifacts, and systems — and in the ways we choose to remember, challenge, or transform them.

Through research, storytelling, and design, you will investigate legacies that matter to you, asking: What have we been given? What must we change? And what will we leave behind?

Each project will create a transmedia experience that honors, critiques, or reimagines legacy, forging connections between past, present, and future.

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QUESTIONS

Whose stories, marks, or ideas have shaped your life?
What traces of the past influence your present?
Which legacies do you choose to honor, challenge, or transform?
How do stories and traditions evolve across generations?
How does design preserve, distort, or reinvent what remains?
How will your work contribute to cultural, social, or environmental memory?
How can design make intangible traces visible?

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CHALLENGE

Students are tasked with exploring and investigating the theme of legacy through the design of a three-part transmedia experience which frames or reframes an inherited story or system. The work should preserve, disrupt, or reinvent to shift meaning and invite new ways of seeing.

This will require rigorous research, a deep understanding of the chosen perspective, and a clear design strategy for how to frame or reframe it. Each medium should bring a distinct perspective, and together they should create a cohesive, layered narrative experience.

This theme challenges students to see design as both archive and invention — as a means of preserving what matters and as a tool for shaping what comes next.

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POSSIBLE TOPICS (For Consideration)

~ Cultural Heritage & Storytelling – Oral histories, endangered languages, folk art, culinary traditions, generational wisdom
~ Land, Place & Displacement – Indigenous stewardship, redlining, borders, gentrification, sacred geography, urban renewal
~ Language & Loss – Extinct alphabets, code-switching, linguistic erasure, translation as cultural transmission
~ Activism & Movements – Civil rights, environmental justice, feminist legacies, queer liberation, diasporic resistance
~ Design History & Visual Culture – Graphic design movements, overlooked designers, evolving visual languages
~ Architectural & Urban Legacies – Historic preservation, adaptive reuse, housing policy, contested monuments
~ Family & Personal Archives – Photo albums, heirlooms, migration stories, memory rituals, names passed down
~ Digital Memory & Virtual Loss – Internet archives, memes as cultural record, obsolete platforms, digital death
~ Ecological Legacy – Climate change impact, biodiversity loss, regenerative design, intergenerational stewardship
~ Media & Representation – How film, TV, and social media shape cultural memory, stereotype vs. legacy
~ Education & Knowledge Transmission – Mentorship, apprenticeship, pedagogy, oral vs. institutional knowledge
~ Rewriting History – Counter-narratives, decolonizing design, reparative storytelling, re-mapping the archive
~ Spiritual & Ancestral Practices – Rituals, altars, sacred objects, intergenerational care
~ Labor & Lineage – Trades passed down, domestic work, garment industry, labor histories and class mobility
~ Others you come up with

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NEW RESOURCE

See the link below for a list of topic examples with additional details you can use as a model for how to approach your concept direction ideation. We will include two examples below approaching the theme of “legacy” from different points of view. See the link below for many others:

1. The Legacy of a Vanishing Language

Audience: Younger speakers and diaspora communities.
Goal: Preserve and re-activate interest in a language or dialect on the brink of disappearing.
Research:
– Interview elders or cultural experts
– Collect oral histories, vocabulary lists, idioms, proverbs
– Study revitalization models (Māori, Yiddish, Hawaiian)
– Analyze sound, script, or writing systems as visual structure
Media Examples: Interactive archive + printed storybook; motion piece about pronunciation and memory.

**Examples that focus on building something that will outlast the project itself:**

2. Creating a Legacy of Visibility for an Underrepresented Community

Audience: Future students, community members, cultural organizations.
Goal: Build a platform that gives voice, recognition, and permanence to a marginalized group whose stories are often overlooked.
Research:
– Interviews with community members across generations
– Cultural anthropology readings
– Documentation of lived experiences (photo, text, participatory workshops)
– Analysis of past attempts at visibility and gaps
Possible mediums: Interactive portrait archive + physical installation.

Examples that focus on building something that will outlast the project itself

Examples of Capstone Topics w/ audience, goals, research approaches, and possible mediums,

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CURRICULUM FOREWORD: Concepts for Understanding

Trace / Tracing / Traces – A mark, sign, or residue that signals something that came before — physical, digital, cultural, or emotional. Also the act of following, mapping, or re‑creating a path, which can lead to both preservation and transformation.

Legacy – The influence, traditions, or material inheritances passed down through generations, intentionally or unintentionally.

Memory & Forgetting – How individuals and societies remember, commemorate, or erase aspects of the past.

Interpretation – The act of making meaning from what remains; how traces are read differently depending on cultural, historical, or personal perspective.

Transformation – The process of altering, reframing, or recontextualizing existing materials, ideas, or narratives.

Continuity & Change – The tension between preserving what is valued and adapting to evolving needs or contexts.

Imprint – The lasting effect of actions, ideas, or designs — visible or invisible — on people, places, and systems.

Authorship & Agency – Who has the right, responsibility, and ability to shape or transmit a legacy.

Materiality – The role that physical or digital form plays in how traces are preserved, experienced, and interpreted.

Time & Temporality – Understanding legacy as existing across multiple temporalities — past, present, and possible futures.

Structural Meaning Units (SMUs) – SMUs are the smallest building blocks of meaning in design — like design “atoms.” SMUs are elements significant to shaping meaning or guiding interpretation, whether they are visual, spatial, temporal, or interactive in nature. SMUs gain power by interacting with other SMUs in the same medium and across media.

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FRAMEWORK

“Transmedia, used by itself, simply means ‘across media.’ …Transmedia refers to a set of choices made about the best approach to tell a particular story to a particular audience in a particular context… Transmedia immerses an audience in a story’s universe through a number of dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex story.”
— Henry Jenkins

The Senior Capstone Exhibition TRACEWORK, will open in mid-April , 2026. The exhibition will showcase a rigorous research-driven design process and an exciting and unique visual rendition of your research. The purpose of this exhibition is to present your value as a professional designer by demonstrating what graphic design can do to communicate messages through compelling experiences.

Each of you will formulate the conceptual framework, develop, design and deploy an integrated “transmedia narrative” or campaign composed of three (2-3) distinct stories or narratives which together create a “comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex story.” (Henry Jenkins).

Each student (or pair of collaborating students) will establish a direction or micro-theme that can be explored through a 2/or/3-part narrative lens. Each narrative will have its own focus within the larger “story” and take a different point of view on the topic. The narratives should be able to stand on their own, but taken together they broadly address a single issue.

Students will develop a long-term working plan and execute the technical and technological implementation, whereby the narratives are arrayed and experienced across multiple media platforms to culminate in a unified exhibition installation set, with interrelated narrative content, where “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The goal is: form/medium and content inextricably working together.

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NARRATIVE

Narrative is one of the principal ways we organize our experiences of the world. Narrative helps us communicate with one another, chart our way through new experiences, and make order out of the complexity/disarray of events, characters, actions, and time periods that make up our lives. Narratives come in many forms — written, image-based, diagrammatic, static, time-based, or any combination. While narrative is often bound to a sequential structure, shifts in place or time add depth and complexity to what might seem at first to be a straight “linear” story. Shifts in narrator or point of view from which the story is told can expand how a narrative functions.

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CAPSTONE COMPONENTS

+ Abstract: the name, working title, and a 100-200 word description of your capstone — subject and point of view, research interests, background history/research, target audience, use of media, exhibition considerations, strategy for design approach, and description of your solutions.

+ Narrative/s: a larger “story” made up of three distinct narratives, utilizing 2-3 different media

+ Exhibition: design of exhibition installation of your narrative/s

+ Documentation:  presentation of your research and design process

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PROCESS OVERVIEW

Phase 1: Ideation & Research

Ideation & Research will consist of the formulation of the conceptual framework for your project, identification of larger narrative “theme” or story, and the development/collection/creation of content and other raw materials. Write an approx. 100-200 word abstract that describes your topic.

Phase 2: Design Development

Design Development, will encompass the creation of multiple narrative content (your “Story World”), the planning of a systems-oriented functional framework of three (3) distinct narratives that work independently and as a “whole:” the goal being: form/medium and content inextricably working together. An extensive research and sketch process will be an essential aspect of your work.

Phase 3: Design Implementation

Design Implementation will involve the refinement of your narrative/s, the build-out of all technological requirements (i.e bookbinding, interactive prototyping/simulation, etc), and the design and planning of your individual exhibition.

Phase 4: Design Validation

Design Validation will focus on the completion of your Capstone, and the coordination and presentation of a cohesive transmedia narrative experience.

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CONSIDERATIONS

/ What point of view will you take on the capstone theme?
/ What is the goal of your communication? (inspire, educate, prompt action, etc.)
/ What strategies can you use to gather and document data/raw materials about your topic?
/ What different strategies can you use to structure these raw materials to create a compelling visual narrative?
/ Explore/create the user journey/map that represent the “touch points” of the experience.

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WHAT TO RESEARCH & COLLECT
+ Imagery (photographs, drawings, diagrams, charts, maps, textures, colors, etc)
+ Verbal language/copy (audio transcripts, contextual copy or other language i.e.
in artifacts such as signs, conversations, letters, menu’s, instructions, etc.
+ Sound/audio
+ Newspaper articles, etc.
+ Take notes, etc.
+ Anything else that you can think of! Be creative.

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HOMEWORK OVER THANKSGIVING: Due Monday, December 1st
Research topics of interest for your Capstone, using multiple research methods, including:
– Brainstorming, image and language gathering, mind mapping, sorting, etc.
– Utilize the RU-N Dialogue Platform > and “pin” posts of interest.
Develop three (3) distinctly different concepts for your Capstone and present these for feedback after Thanksgiving.

*See Post with Capstone Ideation Presentation guidelines and instructions here.

RESOURCES & INSPIRATION

Research Website for Capstone 2026

Here is the link to the Research Website prepared for you for TRACEWORK. Use this as the starting-point for your Capstone research.

You can reach out to Natalie Borisovitz, Research Librarian, if you would like guidance on how to research your areas of interest / topic(s). You can meet with her virtually, or in-person, or correspond by email. Her email is: natalieb@rutgers.edu

See Capstone *Final Exam Didactic Presentation* examples from Last Year’s Cohort here

See Capstone 2026 Resources & Inspiration here
(We will continue to update this.)

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CAPSTONE IDEATION DUE AT CROSS-MEDIA EXAM: Wednesday, December 17th, 3-6pm

Capstone Presentation Components
Ideation & Research will consist of the formulation of the conceptual framework for your project, identification of larger narrative “theme” or story, and the development/collection/creation of content and other raw materials. Write an approx. 100-200 word abstract that describes your topic.

Capstone Project Ideation which should include:
1. Refined Capstone Abstract
– Identification of larger narrative “theme” or story
– Preliminary Topic Research
2. Discussion of Potential Mediums (3) for your capstone
3. Preliminary Visual Research (including inspiration, visual language research and/or studies; imagery exploration, typography exploration/type studies, color palette exploration, etc.)
4. Plan for Next Steps of Capstone Research & Exploration, and design exploration to be undertaken over Winter Break.