SHIFT: AIGA DEC Virtual Summit
Aug. 3-7, 2020

The events of 2020 have required design educators to SHIFT many things: priorities, expectations, formats, locations, modalities, and perspectives. The suddenness of these shifts has also revealed many previously unseen or overlooked aspects of design education: weaknesses, biases, inequities, issues of accessibility—as well as opportunities for innovation and evolution. Our present moment has left us with lingering questions about what it means to be a design educator and what our role might look like in the future.

The AIGA Design Educators Community will present SHIFT, an AIGA DEC Virtual Summit, on August 3-7, 2020. This week-long online event seeks to gather the design education community to take stock of where we are, what we have learned, and what we want to do next. The summit will focus on themes of Teaching, Research, and Community, and will feature multiple ways for participants to engage with each other and the content—including asynchronous panel presentations, synchronous virtual roundtables, online forums for discussion, and more.

This summit strives to bring together as many different voices and perspectives as possible, especially those that have been historically underrepresented in conversations around design education. In this watershed moment it is imperative that we pause, listen, reflect, and learn from each other. Through dialogue and discourse, we aim to explore pluralistic answers to the following questions:

How must our teaching shift?
How must our research shift?
How must our community shift?

Visit the SHIFT 2020 page for more details.