Faculty

students taking pictures of work posted on the wall in a studio
student work posted on a studio wall
Ron Hall and students looking at a computer screen in the studio
student-work-wall a wall in the studio with lots of design work like sketches posted

Dennis Cheatham, Graduate Director & Communication Design Faculty

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Dennis Cheatham is an Associate Professor of Communication Design and Graduate Director of the MFA in Experience Design at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He researches ways people and design decisions intersect at experiential and systemic levels. His recent work explores how co-creating end-of-life choices with stakeholders can facilitate meaningful decision-making resources and tools; ways multiple intelligence theories can be applied to facilitate learning necessary for addressing complex problems; and how rhetoric and semantics in design affect aspirations and goals. Dennis is a Scripps Gerontology Center Research Fellow and his current research work is a transdisciplinary research project titled Living Values that focuses on end-of-life choices and advance care planning for underserved populations in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky.

Prior to his academic appointment, Dennis practiced design professionally for fifteen years as a creative director, graphic, interaction, and experience designer at agencies, in-house, and non-profit organizations in the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas area with and for organizations including Southwest Airlines, HKS Architects, Irving Bible Church, Cook Children’s Hospital, Water is Basic and public broadcasting television station, KERA. Dennis holds a Master of Fine Arts in Applied Design Research from the University of North Texas as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Communication Design and a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Texas Tech University.

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James Coyle, Marketing & ETBD Faculty

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James Coyle received his M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (1997) in Journalism (Advertising Studies) from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He currently holds a joint appointment in the Marketing Department and the Emerging Technology in Business + Design Department. From 1997 through the Spring semester of 2006, James taught at Baruch College, City University of New York.

His academic work has been published in several journals, including the Journal of Advertising, the Journal of Interactive Advertising, the Journal of Advertising Research, the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Website Promotion, and the Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising. He has written a book chapter that appears in the Advertising and the World Wide Web, 2nd edition (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), and a book titled Internet Resources and Services for International Marketing and Advertising: A Global Guide (Oryx Press, 2002). He was also the recipient of a $240,000 grant from the NASD Education Foundation in 2005. He used the grant money to develop an online guide, DollarsFromSense, to help prepare college-age youth to make wise financial investment decisions.

James’ research interests include how consumers process and share interactive and rich media content in commercial websites and the influence of consumer expectations on website navigation experiences. He currently teaches E-Commerce and the Internet, and the Emerging Technology in Business + Design Practicum.

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Artie Kuhn, ETBD Faculty & Assistant Director of ETBD

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For over ten years, Artie worked in the interactive industry as a designer, developer, project manager, user researcher and product manager. His work included digital solutions for a diverse set of firms including toymaker Hasbro, Inc., Cincinnati Children’s Hospital’s innovative Bioinformatics Research Center, Graeter’s Ice Cream, Aplia Learning and Thomson Publishing/Cengage Learning. Through leading inter-disciplinary teams in the creation of digital products and platforms, Artie saw the positive transformative effect interactive media can have across all disciplines.

This experience fuels a passion for engaging with diverse students in exploring and coming to grips with the ramifications of interactive media in their field of pursuit. His current research, design, development and consulting work also explores this transformative effect. He teaches courses in interaction design, data visualization, and digital product development.

Artie earned his Bachelors of Science in digital design from the University of Cincinnati and his MFA in interaction design and game development from the Savannah College of Art and Design. His work has been presented at the TED 2011 conference, earned awards from ID Magazine and Macromedia and was published in the book Type in Motion 2. Before joining ETBD, Artie taught part-time in DAAP at the University of Cincinnati for eight years. At home, Artie partners with his wife Lisa (also a designer) in raising their three rambunctious, but wonderful, young kids.

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Heidi A. McKee, English & ETBD Faculty

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Heidi A. McKee is a professor of Professional Writing in the English Department and an affiliate faculty member in Emerging Technology in Business and Design at Miami University. Her teaching and research interests include professional communication, digital rhetorics, and research ethics and methodologies. Her most recent book, co-authored with James Porter, is Professional Communication and Network Interaction (2017). Her and Porter’s current research focuses on human-machine interaction in professional contexts, examining the impact of artificial intelligence on communication and collaboration. A recent publication, “Ethics for AI Writing: The Importance of Rhetorical Context,” is available at the AAAI/ACM Proceedings for the 2020 Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society.

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Glenn Platt, Marketing & ETBD Director

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Glenn Platt received his Bachelor of Arts (with departmental honors) from University of Florida and his MS and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, graduating in 1993.

He is currently the C. Michael Armstrong Chair, Professor of Marketing and has been Director of the Interactive Media Studies Program (and ETBD) since 2000. Glenn is President Emeritus of the International Digital Media and Arts Association. Glenn, along with his colleague Prof. Lage, coined the phrase “inverted classroom” with a 2000 seminal work outlining the benefits of using technology to move active learning into the classroom and lecture outside of class. He has won the School of Business Teaching Effectiveness Award, the Associated Student Government Effective Educator Award, and the University’s Knox Award for Teaching.

Besides directing ETBD, Glenn teaches the Social Media Marketing, Internet/Digital Marketing, and the ETBD/AI capstone consulting course. He consults in areas of Social Media, Internet Marketing, and eCommerce.

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James Porter, English & ETBD Faculty

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Jim Porter is a Professor in ETBD and English specializing in rhetoric and professional communication. His main area of research is the rhetoric and ethics of digital communication. He teaches courses in digital media ethics, information design and data visualization, rhetoric theory and history, and humanities approaches to technology design. Porter has published five scholarly books, including Professional Communication and Network Interaction (Routledge, 2017) and The Ethics of Internet Research (Peter Lang, 2009), both with his colleague Heidi McKee. Currently, he is conducting research on AI-based writing machines and their implications for professional communication.

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Zack Tucker, Communication Design Faculty

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Zack Tucker is an Ohio-based designer, researcher, and educator exploring the intersection of co-design, civic agency, and autonomous technologies. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Communication Design in the Department of Art at Miami University.

His research aims to harness the power of storytelling and narrative to temporarily suspend pre-existing attitudes and provide a place for empathic dialogue and reflection to create equity between dominant and non-dominant groups. Current projects include a speculative Twitter bot used for long-term self-reflection and an emerging framework for identifying, visualizing, and reorganizing power disparities between the designer and the people they design for and/or with.

Zack earned an MFA in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois and holds an MA in Educational Technology and BFA in Art from Southeast Missouri State University. Prior to life on the tenure track, Zack held several positions in design and higher education including Senior Design Strategist for the Siebel Center for Design, Educational Technology Specialist for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, and Media Specialist for Kent Library at Southeast Missouri State University where he served as Director of the Heather MacDonald Greene Multimedia Center and led a human-centered redesign of the library website.

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