Contact

nbbauch@gmail.com

Design

My career is defined by the intersection of spatial-environmental thinking and creative media production.  After completing a Ph.D. in Geography from UCLA, I took on a Product Design leadership role at Stanford University’s digital scholarship lab.  While there, I authored and oversaw all aspects of a custom-built web experience detailing the photographic and cultural histories of the Grand Canyon.  For over 4 years I was an experience designer, content designer, interaction designer, and product designer all rolled into one.  As my publisher’s first born-digital project, my team and I set a template for the relationship between designers, authors, and publishers in this space.

 In my years at Stanford I became a designer.  This experience fundamentally changed my outlook on how geography can be practiced, and I would spend the next 6 years and beyond refining and exploring this craft.  My love of learning has led me to enjoy being adaptable and nimble in the creation process.

 Leadership

I took on a high-end leadership role at the University of Oklahoma, where I served as the founding faculty director of a Design + Geography curriculum, the physical and conceptual space of which I named the Experimental Geography Studio.  While there I conceived and taught classes on design frameworks and media experimentation as they relate to spatial and environmental themes.  My focus here was about how to carry out geographical research in mediums beyond text, including web design, video, cartography, and gallery installation.  In this leadership role, I mentored students in design processes to build a series of products, exhibits, and events for the campus, region, and national Geo-Humanities communities.

 Philosophy

My main philosophy at Oklahoma was to expand on what I’d learned through digital design.  Once I realized that content is entwined with the medium in which it’s created, my next step was to see how geographical questions do in fact inform various digital and physical mediums, and how those mediums in turn affect the research questions and results.  So I created a petri dish of experimentation, with students bringing geographical topics and working in a range of mediums, from digital sound, video, sculptural installation, website-building, graphic design, and virtual reality.

 This meant that I was steering a large ship, sharing technical expertise when applicable, but more importantly focusing on the making and design process that characterizes geographical expression.  In my classes I asked “what problem are you trying to solve, and which medium is going to give you the best way to solve that problem in a clear and concise way?”  For example, if you’re working in video, what exactly does video do that something else can’t?

 This question that I asked my students over and over again became the key part of my design philosophy. 

Put another way: When I design, I strive to make my chosen medium do work for me such that the medium speaks as much as the content.

Art School

As this work progressed—and my attention to creative media production increased—I decided to formalize my design practice by returning to school to earn an M.F.A. degree in Visual Art from the University of Minnesota.  During this time I expanded my approach to include the creation of visual images and narratives.  I shifted emphasis from pedagogical and leadership skills to toward a maker’s practice and maker’s knowledge, nurturing a more direct engagement with my objects of interest.  I developed mastery in several making processes, as well as theoretical frameworks that feed directly into User Experience.

Specifically, book layouts, installation design, and videography are all exercises in user experience because they demand the creator to empathize with users.  Visual communication can’t happen until the designer puts themselves in the mind of the end user.

I like thinking about landscapes, economies, pop culture, and what it means to be a mobile human.

Specific interests include: