Ann McDonald

Ann McDonald is an Associate Professor of Design at Northeastern University. She visualizes the often unseen histories, exchanges, and experiences that link people to place. Her practice engages place-based eco-somatics to explore the contrasts of care and neglect via invisible and visible traces inscribed upon interstitial urban wilds and waterways. Our ecological crisis necessitates a renewed focus on how embodied storytelling, visualization, and mapping can aid in better understanding and caring for rivers and their surrounding natural environments, including green and grey infrastructures.

She studied at the Institute of Design in Chicago, earned a BFA in Design from the University of Washington in Seattle, received an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University, and continued post-graduate studies in the Master of Environmental Design program in the Yale School of Architecture.

More broadly, her research examines the role of diagrams and visual notational systems in documenting and synthesizing experiences as a means for collaboration, speculation, and envisioning of conditions for future experiences.

Her project-based inquiries investigate the potential for increased engagement and learning offered by dynamic information systems. Exhibit and interactive design work for The Boston Symphony Orchestra, The New England Aquarium, The National Health Sciences Consortium, and the American Society of Plant Biology have offered broad audiences access to complex topics. She was a lead investigator for the Sticks + Stones Project, a collaborative exchange examining labeling and stereotyping, which won a Core 77 Design Education Initiatives Design Award.

She was a principal investigator for No2NOx, using participatory design methods with middle school students in science classrooms to identify better choices for a better planet, which won a MacArthur Foundation-funded Digital Media Learning Lab Award. She was also a co-founder of Advisestream, a comprehensive academic advising and holistic student planning platform, now part of Civitas Learning.

Early in her professional career, she worked as a designer at architecture and planning firms, environmental place branding and wayfinding firms, and museum exhibit design firms.