Susan Hagan

Susan M. Hagan, Ph.D. MDes received her master's degree in Design and Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University. She is now an Associate Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Information Systems program on the Pittsburgh and Qatar campuses. She focuses her research on the interaction of words, images, and typeface for their collaborative ability to address "sticky" problems. Her book, "The Space between Look and Read: Designing Complementary Meaning," published by MIT Press in April 2023, offers a framework that identifies the unique contributions image, words, and typeface offer, the ties that hold them in loose to tight unions, their seven ordinary to extraordinary outcomes, and a method of analysis, Inter-play, that focuses on one outcome, complementary meaning, for its potential to address problems linked to bias and inexperience.


An earlier article, "Visual/Verbal Collaboration in Print Complementary Differences, Necessary Ties, and an Untapped Rhetorical Opportunity" (2007) received the 2008 NCTE Best Article on Philosophy or Theory for Technical or Scientific Communication and set the direction for her book. With Erik Stolterman, she envisioned and co-edited a special issue of Artifact: The Interaction of Practice and Theory in 2007. Collaborating with a colleague in computer science led to, Typesetting for Improved Readability using Lexical and Syntactic Information, published in the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) for ACL 2013, the premier conference in the field of computational linguistics. She was invited to contribute to Alan Male’s edited volume, "A Companion Guide to Illustration." Her chapter, Illustrators: Collaborative Problem Solvers in Three Environments, focuses on how illustration brings important collaborative meaning, in combination with text, to argument, narrative, and description that cannot be similarly offered through photographs or words.