Art faculty and students won four American Institute of Graphic Artists Southeastern Excellence in Design awards.

“The AIGD (American Institute for Graphic Design) SEED awards are awarded every two years to recognize design excellence in the Southeast,” Deborah Shmerler, associate professor in graphic design, said. “They represent the best work across all disciplines of communications and strategy from designers in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and North Carolina.”

Shmerler and a group of students won gold in their category for their Living Light house plans.

“Living Light is the University of Tennessee’s entry into the Solar Decathlon 2011 competition,” Shmerler said. “As one of 20 university teams from around the world competing, UT has been challenged by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2011 to design, build and exhibit an energy-efficient, solar-powered home.”

The national competition takes place Sept. 23 through Oct. 2 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Participants demonstrate clean-energy solutions, while developing a well-trained work force dedicated to environmental sustainability and green technologies. The homes will be juried beginning in October in 10 categories, including, but not limited to: architecture, engineering, communications and market appeal.

In addition to the SEED award, Shmerler also won an excellence for her stART now program, a mentoring program at UT developed by graphic design students in the spring of 2009.

“(The students) spent the semester mentoring an advanced art class, taught by Peggy Leland at Central High School,” Shmerler said.

The overall goal of this Design Ignites Change initiative was to promote and encourage high school students to develop projects that would benefit their local community through energizing their personal goals and interests.

Fourteen students from UT’s graphic design area mentored 26 students from Leland’s class, addressing issues from war to violence to education, poverty and health.

In 14 weeks, the students developed a range of projects, including a 15-minute documentary on education, a social networking site about violence and a school garden.

“It is important that the students identify the projects they are interested in designing; the teacher’s role is one of facilitation,” Shmerler said. “StART now is an ongoing program. We are currently identifying other schools for future participation.”

Sarah Lowe, associate professor in graphic design, also won a SEED gold award and an excellence award.

Lowe, in collaboration with Eric Ogle, program coordinator for the Community Partnership Center, the Beck Cultural Exchange Center and the Carpetbag Theatre, won a gold award for their work on the Knoxville African-American Tours of Cultural Heritage smartphone application.

This mobile phone application lets users tour Knoxville by visiting sites that are culturally important to African-Americans and the Civil Rights Movement.

“You get a map of Knoxville when you first log on to the application, and it details 14 different sites,” Lowe said. “At 10 of the 14 sites, there is digital video available. Each of these are sites of significance to Knoxville’s African-American history.”

The application permits users to view video, produced by the Carpetbag Theatre, access historic and current photos and read a synopsis of what happened at the historic site.

The application is free at the iTunes app store and, as of this spring, has had 500 downloads since September 2010.

Lowe also won an excellence award for a project that employed the “Slow Down” edition of GOOD Magazine.

“GOOD Magazine is a magazine that takes a topic and presents it with an eye to moving the world forward,” Lowe said. “I chose the ‘Slow Down’ issue because it’s all about looking at where we are as a society. We tend to be a society that is consumed with the next best thing, what’s going to happen, growth, speed and progress.”

Using the issue as a starting point, students were able to research and design projects of their own interests on different subjects such as snail mail and greenwashing.

“The pedagogical goals of the project are to instill an understanding about what it means to bring research into a creative process,” Lowe said.

“A student who is an avid, enthusiastic biker developed a system to generate electricity from his bike,” Lowe said. “He documented the process of building this system and showed it powering different things, such as a TV in the woods.”

To see the project of building a bike-power generator, visit http://www.thepowerpedal.com.

“Students get a chance to read through the articles, we talk about it as a class, they find their own interest in the conversation and take it from there to a finished, designed project,” she said.?