Design Educator Conferences past and upcoming

Every three years the Design Educators Community Steering Committee selects 4 design educator conferences to each receive $10,000 support grants thanks to the generosity of Adobe.

The current cycle (2008-2010) kicked off in Baltimore, fall 2008 with Social Studies: Educating Designers in a Connected World organized by Ellen Lupton, Jennifer Cole Phillips,and Brockett Horne. In spring, 2009, Linda Bracamontes-Roeger, Joerg Becker, Sharon Oiga, Philip Burton, Marcia Lausen, and Matthew Gaynor presented Future History 3: 21st Century Curriculum. Many of the presentations for these events are archived on their sites.

Next spring, 2010, Response_Ability will take place in Bowling Green, Ohio. Organized by Matt Davis, Amy Fidler, and Jenn Stucker, Response_Ability "aims to foster an ongoing dialogue and debate about design ethics, sustainability and design education. How can we (should we?) create students who feel a responsibility to their world? How do we, as educators, instill the capacity for our students to become thinking, ethical designers? How do we teach them to look beyond specifying recycled paper at a project's end, but to instead, think creatively in the conception of their project to be wholly sustainable from the start?"

In fall, 2010, Object User Context will be presented in Raleigh, North Carolina. ...

Organized by Santiago Piedrafita, Meredith Davis, Denise Gonzales Crisp and Kermit Bailey, Object User Context conference will look at the shift from thinking about objects > to thinking about users > to thinking about contexts. "Graphic design, once focused on the creation of objects, now addresses an increasingly complex culture, characterized by information overload and rapidly changing technology. While recent attention to the "needs and wants of users" has made some communication more responsive to the people for whom we design, it often fails to capture the situatedness of communication and its audiences within larger systems. Context-centered design addresses the settings, social forces, systems, and shaping influences of and for design, with particular concern for the issues arising from complexity and the long-term consequences of design action."

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Posted by designeducators in Events | August 12, 2009