About Dr. Ruecker
Bio
A scholar in information and communication design, Dr. Stan Ruecker is the Anthony J. Petullo Professor of Design at the University of Illinois. He has been tenured at three different universities: the University of Alberta in the MA in Humanities Computing program; Illinois Tech in the School of Design (a.k.a. the New Bauhaus); University of Illinois School of Design. From 2013-16, he was Visiting Professor at UNISINOS in Brazil; since 2018, he is Visiting Professor at the Dalian University of Technology. Since joining the faculty at University of Illinois, he has been appointed as Affiliate Professor in the Informatics Program of the iSchool and the Carle College of Medicine.
Professor Ruecker has written extensively on design and the digital humanities. He has co-authored with over 250 different people, working collaboratively in over 23 academic disciplines. In addition to his 2011 book with Milena Radzikowska and Stéfan Sinclair, Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage: A Guide to Rich-Prospect Browsing, he has published over 150 academic papers and presented at more than 200 conferences. His work has focused on the future of reading; his research teams have developed more than two dozen prototypes for use in algorithmic criticism. He is currently exploring physical interfaces for complex conceptual work, such as text analysis, modeling time, and designing experience.
He is a major grant holder, and his research teams have been supported by grants in design, computing science, educational technology, literature, communication, library and information studies, and humanities computing. He was the principal investigator of the SSHRC SRG Humanities Visualization group, and lead the interface design team of the Mellon-Funded projects No-one Remembers Acronyms (NORA) and Metadata Open New Knowledge (MONK), as well as the seven-year SSHRC MCRI Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project.
Along with Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Milena Radzikowska, he is co-editor of a collection due out in 2020 from Intellect Books, entitled Better Futures: Design Research Across the Disciplines. With Milena Radzikowska, he is author of Mutual Understanding: Design and the Digital Humanities, also expected for publication in 2020. He is founding member of two international groups developing new theories of key concepts for use by designers. First is the Q-Collaborative, an intersectional feminist design research group based at the University of Watleroo. Second is the Design Concepts Lab at the University of Illinois. Their current topic is “what is an opinion?” More about the research group and their projects can be found at publish.illinois.edu/designconceptslab.
He holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Humanities Computing from University of Alberta, an MDes from the same, an MA in English literature from University of Toronto, and advanced undergraduate degrees in English literature and computer science from University of Regina.