SHIFT: AIGA Design Educators Community 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: AIGA DEC Virtual Summit, 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. The summit will be free and open to all design educators.
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?
A New Kind of Proceedings + Living Archives
We are creating a new kind of proceedings for the SHIFT 2020 Virtual Summit and we need your help! Rather than a static collection of abstracts and papers written by a handful of people, we want to capture and gather together content shared and discussed during the summit (including the pre-recorded panel discussions, the live roundtables and panel conversations, and especially from the Slack) and make it accessible and editable by our attendees and community. We also want to announce our official call for submissions for materials FROM and ABOUT the SHIFT 2020 Virtual Summit. View the call for proceedings.
The SHIFT 2020 Virtual Summit is presented in partnership with the AIGA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Task Force. The AIGA Design Educators Community (DEC) Steering Committee and the SHIFT planning committee would like to thank the DEI Task Force for their generous collaboration and contribution to the summit programming. It is only by working together that we will make meaningful and lasting change possible.
Registration
Registration is free and open to all design educators and graduate students.
The Slack community will be used as the main hub for content and community-building during the week of the summit. After the summit, the Slack community will remain active and open to all design educators and will serve as the primary hub for the DEC community moving forward.
Summit Schedule
View all recorded sessions on our YouTube page, or at the links below. For links, resources and other content shared during the summit, view the Living Archives.
Monday, Aug. 3
SUMMIT OPENING
1:00-1:30 p.m. EDT • Live welcome session*
*Includes ASL Interpreter MC: Lee-Sean Huang, AIGA Design Education Manager Bennie F. Johnson, Executive Director, AIGA Liese Zahabi + Alberto Rigau + Ali Place, SHIFT Summit Co-chairs Meaghan Dee + Meena Khalili, Co-chairs, AIGA Design Educators Community Steering Committee Carlos Estrada + Gaby Hernández, AIGA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force
1:30-2:00 p.m. EDT • Welcome mixer
The first of several “5-Minute Mixers.” Want to make some quick connections? We will randomly assign you to a two-person breakout room where you will have 5 minutes to chat with the other person before you are whisked off to another breakout room! You will have the chance to connect with 5 different people in this fast format, and you can continue the discussions (if you so choose) in the Slack.
