Ziddi Msangi

faculty

Ziddi Msangi

Associate Professor

Art & Design

Contact

508-999-9291

508-910-6977

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College of Visual & Performing Arts 310A

Education

1996Cranbrook Academy of ArtMFA
1993San Jose State UniversityBFA

Teaching

  • Graphic Design
  • Community Engagement
  • Graduate Program

Teaching

Programs

Teaching

Courses

Graphic Design basics. Introduction to icon development, packaging design, information design. Students are introduced to communication concepts of audience, form and content, and semiotics. Handcraft is reinforced and vector-based design technology is introduced.

Collaborative process and human-centered design. In addition to practicing team development and presentation methods, students will follow the stages of Design Thinking: empathize, define, research, ideate, prototype, and test. Predicated on solving a human issue, assignment outcomes are not restricted to any one media. This course encourages students to develop a variety of solutions.

Research

Research activities

  • East African textiles and their role as communication system
  • Human Centered Design

Research

Research interests

  • Design
  • Design + Society
  • Design + History
  • Design + Politics

Ziddi Msangi, a designer and educator, holds an MFA in Graphic Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art (1996).

He was born in Tanzania and moved to California as a child. This early experience fostered an awareness and curiosity about history, power and place.

Cultural interpretation, and placing the narratives that form identities into a social, historical, and cultural context have influenced how Msangi teaches and designs.

This includes designing for community engagement, understanding and applying Universal Design principles of inclusion and honoring the students lived experiences. This influence shows up regardless of what level Prof. Msangi teaches at (undergraduate as well as the graduate level) and this also influences him in his administrative leadership when he served as Graduate Program Director for the Visual Design program.

His ongoing visual research and exploration is about the form and meaning of the East African cloth wrap, Kanga. The results have been presented nationally and internationally including Rhode Island School of Design, Hongik University in Seoul, Korea and University of Johannesburg in South Africa.

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