MARCY WACKER
With more than 25 years of professional practice and 15 years of teaching, Marcy returned to UC Davis to explore design’s “gaps”—overlooked, avoided, and ignored spaces. Her work acknowledges and amplifies forgotten objects, people, and ideas, investigates how they reveal and influence our human experience, and reimagines how we teach design and why. Her current research focuses on developing design teaching resources for and with educators and students.
Marcy is also the founder of The Whole Creative, a mentorship program that helps designers find purpose and meaning in their work, Program Director for Capitol Creative Alliance’s Ascenders Academy mentoring program, and host of Pop-Up Art Retreat—a space for creativity, collaboration, and community.
In August 2023, Marcy will continue her teaching career in a new role as Assistant Professor of Design Studies at Sacramento State University.
About this project
Design History Dossier Magazine is part of Design History Dossier (DHD), my MFA thesis project at the University of California, Davis. DHD is designed to help educators address the lack of representation in the graphic design canon. Through an ecosystem of tools, resources, and supportive community engagement, DHD provides educators with classroom-ready materials that challenge existing power dynamics and expose students to a broader range of artifacts, ideas, and practitioners.
DHD would not have been possible without the guidance, support, and endless encouragement of my family, professors and mentors, colleagues, and friends.
With profound appreciation, I thank the following people:
THESIS COMMITTEE
glenda drew, Susan Verba, Simon Sadler, and Brett Louis Snyder
DESIGN MFA Program
Jiayi Young, Chair, and Rachelle Agundes, Graduate Program Coordinator
Design Department Faculty
Javier Arbona, Susan Taber Avila, James Housefield, Tim McNeil, Michael Siminovitch,
and Jae Yong Suk
Education Department Faculty
Marcella Cuellar and Gloria Rodriguez
Colleagues
Debra Belt, Tom Fillebrown, Adam Flint Taylor, Mark Hill, Bill Mead, Elisabeth Nunziato, Natalie Rishe, Alexa Roberts, and Angelina Sorokin
DES 198 Students
Jorge Cervantes, Langston Hay, Britney Lay, Michelle Mendoza, and Pachia Vang
Fellow Graduate Students
Niloufar Abdolmaleki, Hafsa Akter, Diana Valeria Araiza Soto, Cristina Gomez,
Justin Marsh, Alejandra Ruiz, Quinessa Stibbins, Pachia Lucy Vang,
Ofelia Viloche Pulido, Iris Xie, and Rova Yilmaz
FAMILY + Friends
My mother, Priscilla Armitage, husband Matt Wacker, sons Jackson and Owen Wacker, brother Mark Hill, in-laws Jon and Carol Wacker, and dear friends Erin LaRosa, Lee Ann Prebil, and Courtney Zuke
Who We Are
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Design History Dossier (DHD) exists to reshape how design history is understood and taught. It moves away from isolated, canonical narratives and toward understanding design as an interconnected system embedded in social, political, cultural, economic, scientific, spiritual, and environmental contexts. This vision is grounded in four commitments that shape everything we publish, teach, and investigate.
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To Expand the Canon
DHD challenges the Eurocentric, modernist narratives that dominate design education, advocating for a more equitable and inclusive accounting of whose work, ideas, and practices shaped graphic design. -
To Center Students as Knowledge Makers
DHD positions students not as passive recipients of design history but as active researchers, storytellers, and contributors who help build that history.To Surface Hidden Histories
DHD embraces the overlooked, the forgotten, and the ignored as primary sites of learning, treating unexpected sources not as footnotes to design history but as entry points into it.To Pursue Critical Inquiry
DHD's guiding question is "What made this?" a philosophy that every designed artifact is a product of intersecting forces worth investigating. -
What We Publish
Design history is not a finished story. DHD publishes the work of educators, students, and researchers who are actively adding to it by uncovering what's been missed, questioning what's been assumed, and imagining what a more complete history might look like.
Instructors
We publish the work of educators and educator-researchers who are rethinking how design history is taught. Whether you have developed a classroom framework, conducted original research, or designed a teaching approach that challenges the canonical narrative, we want to hear from you.