In my role as the director of a University Writing Center and Digital Studio, a design lens has been essential for my everyday practice. Design, in its broadest sense, is at the heart of what writing center administrators use to fuel and make sense of their work. Design describes the interconnectedness between modes of meaning (e.g., image, writing, color, layout) and the complex work of contextualizing arrangements for specific audiences (New London Group, 1996). However, as Sasha Costanza-Chock (2020) reminds us, “everyone designs, but only certain kinds of design work are acknowledged, valorized, remunerated, and credited.” Settled within this issue’s context, writing studies is a field that recognizes the importance of teaching and practicing multimodal communication in our classrooms. Beyond our classrooms, left unchecked or unexamined, design practices and popularized approaches including design thinking could reinforce the systems and hierarchies it attempts to disrupt. So, while I describe design positively as a lens that has illuminated my practice, I also recognize that it very much falls on the practitioners (and leaders) who use its power to do so in ways that are intrinsically feminist: making large and small decisions based on invitational, intersectional, and ethical frames, aware of difference and accessibility at every stage. My perspective as an administrator is, largely, rooted in my own positionality as a bilingual, white passing, Puerto Rican woman holding a leadership role at a primarily white research institution in the southern United States. For me, design has become a way of understanding or working through the complexity of administrative praxis–able to capture an iterative, nonlinear process and final product simultaneously–whether I am discussing a lesson plan, a team initiative, or a new policy. Design has given me a language to step into a position that holds some influence. I have the power to shape my small space’s sense of community, and it is a responsibility that I do my best to carry with respect and gratitude. Administrators are multimodal designers. They recognize the real-world implications of the artifacts they create (Buchanan, 2001). They shape materials to meet objectives by understanding the wider social conditions of their decisions (Kress, 2010). They deeply consider the production and reception of a final artifact, product, or text (New London Group, 1996) because they have a keen understanding of the audiences for whom their designs are being made (Kress, 2010). Returning to Costanza-Chock (2020), my article considers writing and communication centers as one of the accessible sites where modern design occurs and considers pedagogical questions such as “How do we scope design challenges and frame design problems?”
My time as a writing center administrator has seen challenges that are particular to my time, including trying to design outreach and writing support for a generation of students that spent 2-3 high school years in remote learning environments during the COVID-19 pandemic, some of whom were greatly affected by the digital divide. Within the last three years, another ongoing challenge has been responding to the rise of generative AI tools, two of which were pushed quickly and heavily by my institution, although adoption across campus has been scattered and varies widely even within departments. I present my experiences as ones that respond to a specific local context: a large, public research institution in the southern United States where the student population is 54% white, 22% Latinx, 8.3% Black, 5.8% international, and 4% Asian. Undergraduates are typically between the ages of 18-24. This post will discuss my understanding of multimodal design as a practical and conceptual approach to my work as a writing center director. Specifically, I will look at the ways in which its human-centered praxis has served me for community building within my team and, slowly, with diverse student populations–including multilingual, international, and first-generation students–and organizations (turned partners) on our campus such as the university learning center, graduate resource center, and student-athlete academic services. As new generations of graduate students look to become administrators in writing and communication centers, I would strongly encourage them to study design and multimodality as a central component of their work. These ideas are also for current writing center administrators who are looking to reinvigorate their practice (or rebrand) for different stakeholders while maintaining their space’s own identity.
Although I have been in my position for five years, my work in writing centers is rounding its fourteenth year. My background is in English, writing studies, and graphic design with research interests that examine the ways in which these subjects intertwine. I position myself as a teacher first, a practitioner second, and a scholar third. As an administrator, I am acutely aware of the invisible threads that run through and around my team concerning our operations. My university’s Writing Center and Digital Studio is an environment where teaching and learning happen constantly, and multimodal design is at the heart of it all (Grimm, 2009; Leverenz, 2014; Marback, 2009; Purdy, 2014). To illustrate, all staff take an undergraduate and/or graduate course in peer tutoring, and the learning continues if they are promoted to writing consultants. My staff are my students, sometimes for years, and our curriculum is inherently multimodal. We navigate our curriculum through a constant series of design choices. Like most writing centers, we see turnover each semester that presents a consistent need for mentoring and professional development (e.g., working with advanced graduate projects, web design, layout design, and presentation skills). I teach my staff and my staff teaches me through a curriculum that is grounded in writing center scholarship, selected by administrators, and always receptive to learning new approaches. In our Writing Center and Digital Studio, our curriculum needs to ground our readings in practical application that responds to educational trends within our local context. For instance, in the last two years, our web design workshops for student ePortfolios have been remodeled since Wix, our once go-to web builder, became much more AI-focused and moved many of its features behind paywalls. Additionally, although FSU recently became a Google campus, students do not have access to the Adobe Suite, which makes the industry-standard software inaccessible for most. Thus, we have pivoted to learn more about and teach rhetorical design using Canva Pro, which all students can access for free. Through the waves of the modern university, a multimodal lens acts as a guide to think about how we are positioning ourselves and ensures design remains accessible for our students. In short, multimodal design makes administrators and staff aware of:
- multiliteracies and universal design learning, including ways administrators think through connections between literacy, accessibility, and motivation.
- technologies connected to innovation including composing tools and other support spaces on campus (e.g., makerspaces and FabLabs).
- design practices that have the potential to encourage interdisciplinary and interdepartmental collaboration.
A multimodal design lens has the potential to foster administrative practices that preserve a writing center’s seat at the institutional table by shaping our messages, values, and training. For instance, our training begins with readings about multiliteracies as a framework for our practices (Grimm, 2009). After discussing a multiliteracies framework, students are asked to write multiliteracy narratives about their histories of navigating different literacies leading to their place in our classroom. Many students choose to write about influential classroom experiences or teachers, home literacies connected with food, everyday writing, and language(s), and texts that have shaped their perceptions as writers, readers, and soon-to-be teachers. Later in the semester, as students prepare to shadow in the writing center, we read about valued practices (Hall, 2017) and situate the writing center as its own community of practice with shared goals. Our valued practices are a living document, reviewed and revised by each new cohort of writing center staff. By discussing our valued practices as a team, together, we can:
- determine strategies and practices for different populations of students
- develop practices that are informed by writing pedagogy and scholarship with an eye toward recent trends
- ensure our practices and larger goals reaffirm the writing center as a place of teaching and learning for consultants and students.
Human-centered design, or design focused on helping others, is central to writing center operations. At a time when stakeholders are looking to generative AI for student support, a design mindset is our best defense of human-centered values. A multimodal design lens allows us to stay vigilant for new opportunities and ways to support students in the modern university. For instance, in my university, this has led to partnering with the libraries, the undergraduate research program, the honors program, and the fellowships office–partnerships that open doors for funding and weave us into the fabric of student retention and enrichment. When we pair these connections with the tangible work of teaching poster design, web editing, or prospectus writing, we become a vital node in the campus ecology. We are not a MakerSpace or a Fablab, though we share many of their values around creativity and collaboration (Beck, 2025a/b). Instead, our Writing Center and Digital Studio represent a different kind of collaborative hub where critical literacies are shared and worked through in slow, sometimes messy, and fundamentally human ways.
As a director, I have found multimodal design to be the most useful conceptual framework for navigating the complexity of administrative praxis. Looking ahead, using a well-established call, administrators need to consider how their writing center can establish itself as a vital part of their institution’s ecology (Boquet, 1999; Grimm, 2009; Harris, 2000). Our responses must be localized but, in a broader sense, we should imagine how to situate our centers in this time where students need to understand multiple critical literacies (academic, media, digital, home, heritage, to name a few) and institutions look to streamline services. By viewing our work through a multimodal lens, we demonstrate that the most critical design element in a digital world is still a human one.
Works Cited
Beck, E. (2025a). Fablab. In J. Tham (Ed.), Keywords in making: A rhetorical primer. Parlor Press.
Beck, E. (2025b). Maker competencies. In J. Tham (Ed.), Keywords in making: A rhetorical primer. Parlor Press.
Boquet, E. (1999). “Our little secret”: A history of writing centers, pre- to post-open admissions. College Composition and Communication, 50(3), 463–482.
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Grimm, N. (2009). New conceptual frameworks for writing center work. The Writing Center Journal, 29(2), 11–27.
Harris, M. (2000). Preparing to sit at the head table: Maintaining writing center viability in the twenty-first century. The Writing Center Journal, 20(2), 13–22.
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Marback, R. (2009). Embracing wicked problems: The turn to design in composition studies. College Composition and Communication, 61(2), 397–419.
New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92.
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