About Dr. Briggs
Molly Briggs
Molly Briggs is a landscape and media historian, design theorist, visual artist, and trained printmaker who studies interactive and immersive rhetorics in printed matter in order to discern the mediated shape of built and social space. She combines traditional and makerly research methods to elucidate the workings and agency of landscape-focused representational documents. Her dissertation, The Panoramic Mode: Immersive Media and the Large Parks Movement (2018), contextualizes the commission, design, and reception of large urban park landscapes in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States amid a broader mediated culture of immersive spectacle. She is currently writing a cultural history of immersive graphic overviews in chorographic mapping and articles on the role of makerly methods in place-based material culture research.
Dr. Briggs teaches core courses and special electives in design tools, methods, theory, and research for undergraduates in Graphic Design and graduate students in Design for Responsible Innovation. She holds a PhD in Landscape Architecture History and Theory from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MFA in Printmaking and Photography from the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, and a BFA in Painting from the School of Art and Design at Illinois.
Dr. Briggs is President of the International Panorama Council (IPC—Switzerland) and an Executive Editor of the Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies Yearbook (De Gruyter—Germany). She is a 2023 Map Library Fellow of the MacLean Collection (Illinois) and the recipient of numerous scholarly, creative, and pedagogical grants, awards, and recognitions. She has been represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago since 2004.
Research Interests
Interactive and immersive rhetorics in print media; nineteenth-century popular media; landscape representation; documentary heritage; spatial epistemologies; the built environment; visual culture; painting; printmaking; book design; typography; cartography; design history & theory; media history & theory; landscape history & theory
Xihu Village, China. Image, Molly Briggs, 2024.
Special S25 Course Offering
ARTD 499 Placemaking & Rural Tourism in China
Through collaborative research, planning, and design processes, students will develop coordinated architectural planning and designs, tourism development strategies, wayfinding plans, and memory-making activities tailored to the specific needs of residents and visitors of Xihu Village in the vibrant prefecture-level city of Jingdezhen, China. Grounded in community-engaged, human-centered design research processes, this hybrid studio-seminar course offers diverse, underrepresented, and global perspectives on community-engaged design processes in the global south to students at home and abroad.
This section meets semi-regularly with ARCH 572 (Zhao) and RST 199/594 (Zou). Students in the ARTD section will use visual communication and human-centered design research strategies develop wayfinding plans and memory-making plans that inform, and are informed by, architectural plans developed by students in the Architecture section and tourism marketing plans by students in the Recreation, Sport and Tourism section. We will design wayfinding plans that include coordinated systems of mapping and signage to help visitors navigate the site and interpret its significance. We will also design memory-making activities that build on wayfinding plans by introducing a variety of visitor experiences that enhance the sense of co-presence and engagement with the site’s cultural, historical, and phenomenological features.
Participating students will have the option to attend a nine-day field trip to Chabao, China, the site of our project, in February. Limited scholarships available from various sources. Travel is not required and students who do not travel will complete campus-based activities during the field trip. Learn more here.
Restrictions: Sophomore standing and permission of instructor. 3 Undergraduate hours / 4 Graduate hours.
Xihu Village, China. Image, Molly Briggs, 2024.
Xihu Village, China. Image, Molly Briggs, 2024.
Education
- PhD Landscape Architecture (History & Theory), UIUC
- MFA Art Theory & Practice (Printmaking & Photography), Northwestern University
- BFA Studio Art (Painting), UIUC
Teaching and advising
Classes taught
- ARTD 595 MFA Design for Responsible Innovation Studio F21, S21, F20, S20
- ARTD 570 Design for Responsible Innovation Research Methodology S19
- ARTD 551 Design for Responsible Innovation Research Impact S22
- ARTD 499 Immersion in Print: Reading from the Inside Out S24
- ARTD 499 Placemaking & Rural Tourism in China S25
- ARTD 444 Typographic Systems S22, S24
- ARTD 270 Design Research Methods F19
- ARTD 222 Typographic Practice F22
- ARTD 217 Graphic Design for Non-Majors S25
- ARTD 151 Introduction to Graphic Design F22, F23, F24, S25
- ART 310 Design Thinking S18, F18, S19, F19, S20
- FAA 102 Design Beyond Boundaries S19, F19, S20, F20, F21
Students advised
- Samantha Jones, MFA Design for Responsible Innovation (Research Advisor)
- Shoutao Vincent Wu, MFA Design for Responsible Innovation (Thesis Committee Chair)
- Kiana Fathinezhad, MFA Design for Responsible Innovation (Thesis Committee Chair)
- Yiqi Xiao, MFA Design for Responsible Innovation (Thesis Committee Chair)
- Holly Strickland, MFA Design for Responsible Innovation (Thesis Committee Chair)
- Joshua Pridemore, MFA Design for Responsible Innovation (Thesis Committee)
- Zhi Luo, MFA Design for Responsible Innovation (Thesis Committee Chair)
- Faithful Oladeji, MFA Design for Responsible Innovation (Thesis Committee Chair)
- Natalie Smith, MFA Graphic Design (Thesis Committee)
- Ana Rodas, MFA Graphic Design (Thesis Committee)
- Miriam Salah, MFA Graphic Design (Thesis Committee)
- Rachel Melton, MFA Graphic Design (Thesis Committee)