Biography
Dr. Salamanca is a design researcher and interaction designer who has been experimenting with product aesthetics and information technologies, from both academia and industry, for more than 16 years.
His current research at the Design for Social Viscosity Lab at Illinois is two faceted. One strand inquires about the social and material conditions necessary to foster or hamper cooperation and collaboration in collective practices such as urban commuting. His recent publications discuss the concept of social viscosity and introduce the use of Agent-Based Modelling as a tool for the study of social interaction. His subsidiary research strand explores the visual analysis of large datasets for the achievement of unplanned collective goals in a context such as a smart city.
Research Interests
Ongoing Projects
Design for Social Viscosity lab
- Social computing interactions in unstructured social groups
- Swarm intelligence for collaborative urban cycling
- Trust mediation
- Coalescing Currents: multidisciplinary innovation at Illinois. Large Augmented Reality mural for the Siebel Center for Design
- The Firefly and Serenity Experimental Timeline. Interactive prototype
- Visual analysis of financial communities. Big data and analytics project for Bancolombia, the first private bank in Colombia. See the GitHub repository
Education
Dr. Salamanca is a design researcher and interaction designer who has been experimenting with product aesthetics and information technologies, from both academia and industry, for more than 16 years.
His current research at the Design for Social Viscosity Lab at Illinois is two faceted. One strand inquires about the social and material conditions necessary to foster or hamper cooperation and collaboration in collective practices such as urban commuting. His recent publications discuss the concept of social viscosity and introduce the use of Agent-Based Modelling as a tool for the study of social interaction. His subsidiary research strand explores the visual analysis of large datasets for the achievement of unplanned collective goals in a context such as a smart city.
Dr. Salamanca is currently an assistant professor at the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds a doctoral degree from the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, a Master degree in Design Direction from Domus Academy in Milan, Italy, and a BA in Industrial Design at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia.
Courses Taught
Classes taught
Fall 2021
- ART 310 Design Thinking: Introduces design literacy and promotes an understanding of the field of contemporary design. Explores design thinking as a common thread that connects all disciplines concerned with the making of things, the solving of problems, and the organization of information. Through a series of lectures, case studies, and simple design projects, this course offers an extensible framework of tools and strategies that can be applied across multiple disciplinary boundaries.
- ARTD 351 Graphic Design Inquiry: Complex social problems demand problem solvers to dissect their causes, components, system dynamics, evolutions, and consequences. Data visualization (DataViz) and visual analytics have proven to be invaluable tools in understanding social issues. In this course, we overview the dataviz principles by exploring alternatives to represent social data and distill information.
Spring 2021
- ARTD 299 Creative Coding This course will focus on the foundational concepts and skills of programming through simple design challenges, including bitmap manipulation and gesture-based interactions. At the end of this eight-week class, students will be able to code compelling digital canvases for desktop and mobile devices. The course will make extensive use of popular programming environments such as Processing and P5.js, and might include physical interaction using Arduino depending on the experience and interest of students.
- ARTD 551 Design Research Impact. This seminar helps MFA design students connect their research with pedagogy and professional development strategies to disseminate their research into publishing, conferences, communities, and other relevant venues.
Fall 2020
- ARTD 318 Digital Interaction: This studio explores the construction of compelling user experiences that incorporate the use of digital media. Students investigate both the theoretical and practical aspects of digital interaction through exercises involving information architecture, interface design, and creative coding.
- ARTD 351 Graphic Design Inquiry: Complex social problems demand problem solvers to dissect their causes, components, system dynamics, evolutions, and consequences. Data visualization (DataViz) and visual analytics have proven to be invaluable tools in understanding social issues. In this course, we overview the dataviz principles by exploring alternatives to represent social data and distill information.
Additional Campus Affiliations
Assistant Professor, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Affiliate, Siebel Center for Design
Recent Publications
Salamanca, J., Gómez-Marín, D., & Jordà, S. (2023). The Dynamic Creativity of Proto-artifacts in Generative Computational Co-creation. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 3359, 98-107.
Salamanca, J., & Benson, E. (2022). Collaborating in Conceptual Spaces: How Data Visualization Facilitated by JavaScript Can Improve Interdisciplinary Design Projects. Dialectic, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.3998/dialectic.14932326.0004.101
Salamanca, J., & Briggs, M. (2021). Rationalizing inquiry paths for responsible design in the context of a global pandemic. Strategic Design Research Journal, 14(1), 50-65. https://doi.org/10.4013/sdrj.2021.141.05
Salamanca, J., & Nunez-Corrales, S. (2021). Social Viscosity, Fluidity, and Turbulence in Collective Perceptions of Color: An Agent-Based Model of Color Scale Convergence. In Z. Yang, & E. von Briesen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference of The Computational Social Science Society of the Americas (pp. 191-212). (Springer Proceedings in Complexity). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77517-9_13
Berggrun, L., Salamanca, J., Díaz, J., & Ospina, J. D. (2020). Profitability and money propagation in communities of bank clients: A visual analytics approach. Finance Research Letters, 37, Article 101387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2019.101387