New Contexts / New Practices

When? 10.8.10 @ 10:00am
Where? North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC directions
Type? AIGA National Event
Cost? $225/members, $75/student members, $275/nonmembers

AIGA Design Educators Conference

The goal of the New Contexts / New Practices conference is to generate and publish ideas about how design education will address the defining trends of contemporary practice and culture. Rather than a show-and-tell of what people are currently doing, this is an authoring conference ✐ that will build consensus and action plans for where we should be heading if graphic design is to remain relevant in the 21st century and if we are to achieve the competencies outlined in AIGA Defining the Designer of 2015. In particular, the conference agenda tackles how design education can both reflect changing conditions and shape future practices in a reconfigured communication landscape.

The six topics that form the core conference content are as follows…

Interdisciplinarity: Making Ourselves Attractive to Collaborators
Changing Conditions: Emerging Practices
Shifting Paradigms: Designing Tools and Systems
Social Economies: Enterprise and a New Cultural Geography
Design Research: Building a Culture from Scratch
Designing for Experience: Settings and Behaviors

How This Conference will Work

This is an authoring conference. Unlike other conferences in which participants either make panel presentations or simply attend as spectators, New Contexts / New Practices asks conferees to play one of several roles in response to the groundwork laid by invited main stage provocateurs.

Provocation, moderation, and publication — The work of the conference is curated by three groups of people, selected by the conference committee: provocateurs, moderators, and writers. Authoring, forum presentation, and conferring — For those attending the conference, there are three possible roles to play: co-author, forum presenter, or conferee. Co-author and forum presenter participation is determined by peer review selection, respectively, of prospectuses and forum presentation proposals.

What We are Going to Do with All These Ideas

The goal of the conference is to keep good ideas alive through publication and to use conference content in the curricular work of schools.

The conference makes real-time use of the web to keep attendees up to date on what is happening in the conference sessions. Electronic versions of provocateurs’ speeches are posted throughout the conference, thereby informing co-authors’ work. A team of graduate students, working with conference writers, act as scribes for the posting of results during and after the conference.