Theme 1: Design Education
On learning to become a designer.
Living Tensions:
- Design Thinking – cognitive modes and learning styles
- Problem Solving – recognition procedures, hypothesis development, reasoning processes, solution testing
- Residues – learning from our historical and contemporary design experiences
- Innovation and Creativity – meanings in theory and practice
- Cases – empirical studies of design practices
- Professional Stances – acquiring the designer’s skills, capacities and attitudes
- Methods of Observation – frames of interpretation and criteria for assessment of design
- High and Low Theory – the everyday and theorizing the empirical
- Conceiving Design – complexity, heterogeneity and holism
- Design Pedagogies – teaching and learning in the design professions
- Educational Designs –teacher as instructional designer
- Points of Comparison – precedent, analogy and metaphor in the design process
Theme 2: Design in Society
On the social sources of design and the social effects of design.
Living Tensions
- Design in Social Policy – planning and politics
- Health and Safety – public welfare in design practice
- Design as Business – Markets for design and designing for markets
- Human Systems and Cultural Processes – globalization and the design professions
- Design Without Designers – everyday, amateur, organic and living designs
- Design for Diversity – culture, gender, and sexual orientation
- Design Politics – making technologies, spaces and institutions more responsive to human needs
- The ends of Design – pragmatic, aesthetic, and emancipatory
- The Humanistic and Technological –tensions and synergies
- Values, Culture and Knowledge Systems – the role of perspective, subjectivity, and identity
- Cross-cultural Encounters – working on diverse and global design teams
- Niche Markets – working with diverse clients and users
Theme 3: Designed Objects
On the nature and form of the objects of design.
Living Tensions
- People and Artifacts – exploring uses and usability
- Design Narratives – stories and sense making in the design process
- Cultural Studies – difference, diversity, and multiculturalism in design
- Embodied and Disembodied – ethnographies of design
- Material and Immaterial – mediating ideas and materials
- Function and From – the politics of Industrial design
- Sociology of Design – decorative arts, folk movements, and communities of practice
- Science and Technology in Design – critical analysis of techno-determinism
- Media Ecologies and Object Orientation – designed artifacts and processes as learning experiences
- Co-designed Process and Objects – designing with users and communities
- Close to Customers – design as dialogue
- Universal Design and Access – measuring participatory design systems
Theme 4: Visual Design
On representation using mediums of the visual communication.
Living Tensions
- Media and Mediation – singular and universal visual grammars
- Viewpoint, Perspective, Interest – designer as agent or advocate
- Negotiating Authenticity and Authority – power of continuity and change
- Forms for Communicating Design – photography, film, animation, graphic design, and typography
- New Media and Digital Aesthetics – the evolving avant-garde
- Modeling and Representation – graphic, symbolic, logical, and mathematical
- Synesthesia or Crossing Representational Modes – language, image, space, and medium
- Fine Arts – illustration, photography, film and video
- Visual Economies – advertising, marketing and logos
- Information Systems and Architectures – interface design, digital, software, and social media design
- Public and Professional Understandings – the role of the designer as communicator
- Copyright, Patents, and Intellectual Property – proprietary and the commons, commercial and in the public domain
Theme 5: Design Management and Professional Practice
On the organization of design, design work, and design as a professional practice.
Living Tensions:
- Designing Design – from conceptualization to specification
- Common Knowledges – sharing insights, research, theories, and designs in communities of practice
- Multidisciplinary and Cross-Professional – approaches to design
- Professionalism and its Trajectories – narrowing specialisms and/or multiskilling
- Working with Research – design practitioners as researchers or users of research
- Business of Speed – the economics and pragmatics of rapid delivery and design alongside construction
- Logics of Collaboration – interactivity, responsiveness, and reflexivity in communities of practice
- Democratization of Design and Public Accountability – consultation and consensus building
- Evolutionary Design – collaborations over time
- Expertise as facilitation – designers who know what they might not know
- Designing Projects – planning, management, and project afterlife
- User-Centered or Client-Centered Project Management - the changing role of the designer as advocate
Theme 6: Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design
On constructing spaces, environments, and sustainable design practices.
Living Tensions:
- Common Spaces – ecological footprints, atmospheres, biospheres, eco-spheres
- Life Cycles – designing products and services for the longer term
- Relations of human and Ecological Value – static or dynamic
- Standards and Regulations – implicit, explicit and social certifications
- Planning the Urban – cross-disciplinary perspectives on cities of the future
- Nature Designed – parks, wilderness, and elementary ecologies
- Understanding Human Impacts – natural resource use and environmental footprints
- On Sustainability and Eco-Design – design in an environmental, economic, social, and cultural setting
- Interdisciplinary Ecological Practices – working with scientists, social scientists, and economists
- Scenario Planning – designing for alternative futures
- Making and Breaking Codes – regulation in the design industries
- Documenting Sustainable Design Process – methodologies, heuristics, and routines