Hilary Dana Williams is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. She received her BA in Studio Art and Environmental Studies from Williams College and her MFA in Studio Art, Graphic Design, from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville—where she developed A Fork in the Road as her Project in Lieu of Thesis.

First localized for East Tennessee, the exhibition was shown in Spring 2009 at the UT Downtown Gallery in Knoxville, Tennessee. It was recognized by HOW International Design Awards with a merit award for environmental graphics in their 2010 International Design Annual. Re-localized for Iowa, the exhibition was shown most recently in Fall 2010 at the Anderson Gallery at Drake University and then juried into the 2011 AIGA Minnesota Design Show.

Hilary has given presentations on this project at the 2009 UCDA Design Education Summit—Design for the Common Good, at the Des Moines Art Center as part of Catalyst State Iowa Design Weekend—20 x 2010 : Big Ideas for 2010 + Beyond, as part of the AIGA Iowa Sustain Green Salon Lecture Series, and at The Orton Family Foundation's CommunityMatters'10 Conference on a Design for Change panel. In the upcoming year, she will present it at Michigan State University as part of the Department of Art & Art History Visiting Artist Lecture Series (December 2011) and at the University of Minnesota College of Design as part of the Catalyst Lecture Series (March 2012).

 

Inspired to use social and environmental values as an impetus for visual communication, I have chosen to conceive of this project as an opportunity to engage design in tackling one of the many issues challenging our times: the scale and consequences of our industrial food system. Being moved by statistics about the relationship between food and fossil fuels in my preliminary research on global warming, I began to focus on the task of visualizing the invisible in our everyday eating habits.

I have considered my design process in the context of this question: In what ways can the design of an exhibition provide both incentives and implements to prompt people to change individual habits for the common good? This is a general question that I envision can be applied to any set of habits that affect the common good. In the case of this exhibition, I have aimed specifically to increase the consumption of local and regional foods—first in East Tennessee, now in Iowa.

I assert that it is critical not only to raise awareness about issues such as the scale and consequences of our industrial food system, but also simultaneously to facilitate a response to this newfound understanding. Therefore, I am presenting both information graphics (the “why”) and prototypes (the “how”) that could enable incremental changes in food purchasing and eating habits. My solutions toward this twofold end have ranged from the nauseating visualization of 1.1 million dots on a wall to the design of a calendar charting the seasonality of foods growing in each locale. The latter demonstrates my commitment to making this exhibition specific to the audiences in both Knoxville and Des Moines.

Through my ongoing research process, I have come to appreciate the universality of food as a topic, and I continue to respect the complexity of food ethics and food production. What I recognize about “local” as a criterion for food is the breadth of its effect: to buy and to eat more local and regional foods is not merely an environmentalist agenda—it is an act that impacts ecological health and economic health and human health and community health. What aims could be more universal?

My project seems to have become more timely as it has evolved. First the unprecedented global economic crisis and now the massive oil spill have revealed that the large-scale systems that we often take for granted are not necessarily stable or sustainable, and so it is increasingly apparent that we need to develop alternative systems. Our food system—that on which our very lives depend—is an appropriate one to tend to first.