Taekyeom Lee is an educator, maker, and designer using the artist's material and artistic sensibility. He is currently an Assistant professor of Graphic Design at Illinois State University in Normal, IL. He received an MFA degree in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Recently, his research draws attention nationally and internationally. He exhibited his work and provided workshops and lectures across the country and abroad. He presented through national and international conferences including ATypI(Association Typographique Internationale), ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art), TypeCon, AIGA DEC(Design Educators Community), and NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts). His work has been featured by various media including Communication Arts, Make Magazine, Now This News, Core 77, Art Insider, and New York magazine.

My research explores unconventional materials and digital methods to graphic design to create 3D type, graphics, and even designed objects. This research began with two questions: Where does typography belong in the post-digital age? How do we bridge digital and physical experiences? Post-digital typography is engaged with tangible experience assisted and/or created with various digital controls. For the post-digital typography, the cutting-edge digital techniques play a crucial role in turning intangible ideas into tangible design products with physical substance, also combined with augmented reality to build the strong connection between analog and digital realms. In response to this movement, my research actively adapts digital design and various fabrication methods, specifically 3D printing and CAD design. In a broad sense, my research is aiming to develop, test, and find the place of the emerging technologies in the design process and creative practices.

Technology and design have been in a symbiotic relationship. The exciting and rapidly changing digital manufacturing methods have influenced many fields of art and design including, but not limited to graphic design, product design, sculpture, printmaking, and architecture. These new technologies have introduced new tools for pushing the boundaries of the medium both in terms of concept and materiality. As we have been using digital tools more and more, there are few ongoing discourses regarding the term post-digital, and there are mixtures of hopes and concerns between being human or being digital. There are practice-based researches regarding post-digital; however, no one can authoritatively decide how to define the term, and more theoretical discourses and publications are required. The discourse should focus on the exploration of new avenues and possible ways to bridge digital and physical environments with the emerging technologies. For last decades, many analog and physical objects has been digitized, simulated, and transferred into the digital realm. In my opinion, many things that exist as digital data could be translated into physical or combined into physical space in the post-digital age to bridge the gap between digital and analog worlds.

Designers have worked with the merits and demerits brought with the new technological era while the technological innovations yield influences. Typography has always evolved with technologies and creative processes as new technologies, processes, and materials enable new possibilities. More importantly, they fused new ideas and creative design solutions in graphic design like the digital revolution with the introduction of personal computers caused radical changes. The digitization of type in the digital age reshaped our visual culture and how we experience typography. As a consequence, today, we are mainly consuming letters on the static surface of a page or a screen. The text is living on screen as mirrored image and it could be disappear in a second with no trace. Ironically, however, the new digital technologies naturally redirected the digital experience toward the physical world. It became an agent not only to bridge digital and physical realms, but also to enhance visual and tangible interactions with physical and virtual objects using cutting-edge technologies.

I hope my research and creative practice will inspire and creatively empower art and design professionals.

 MFA thesis  

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