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.

Register for the summit by joining the public DEC Slack community.

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.

Tuesday, Aug. 4

TEACHING

Daily intro video [asynchronous]

How must our teaching shift?

» Bonus video! Students: How must design education shift?

Panel: Human-centered design education [asynchronous]

Ali Place, Marty Maxwell Lane, Kareem Collie, Jen White Johnson, Zachary Vernon, Victoria Shepherd, Jason Wilkins

Panel: Re-imagining the design classroom from the perspective of othered identities [asynchronous]

George Garrastegui, Jessica Arana, Josh Halstead, Julio Martinez, Michele Washington

9:30-10:00 a.m. EDT • Daily Mixer AM

5-Minute Mixer session focused on teaching

11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. EDT • Roundtable: Teaching the History of Graphic Design in the Contemporary Global Context

Roshanak Keyghobadi, Dori Griffin, Angela Riechers, Lisa Maione

1:00-2:00 p.m. EDT • Roundtable: More is no more

Meena Khalili, Anne Stark Ditmeyer (with Patricia Childers, David Habben)

4:00-5:00 p.m. EDT • Roundtable: Empowering students and building community through virtual critique methods

Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Kelly Walters (with Lisa Mercer, Khadijah Abdul Nabi)

5:45-6:15 p.m. EDT • Daily Mixer PM

5-Minute Mixer session focused on teaching

Wednesday, Aug. 5

RESEARCH

Daily intro video [asynchronous]

How must our research shift?

Panel: Design research and tenure & promotion in the age of social distancing [asynchronous]

Liese Zahabi, Aaris Sherin, Anne Berry, Bernard Canniffe, Allison Puff

9:30-10:00 a.m. EDT • Daily Mixer AM

5-Minute Mixer session focused on research

1:00-2:00 p.m. EDT • Panel: What decolonial design is NOT*

*Includes ASL Interpreter
Gabriela Hernández, Sadie Red Wing, Lesley-Ann Noel, Ahmed Ansari

2:30-3:30 p.m. EDT • Roundtable: Paths for research

Meaghan Dee, Helen Armstrong (with Katie Krcmarik)

4:00-5:00 p.m. EDT • Roundtable: Creating through crisis: Time + scale + context

Noopur Agarwal, Jeannie Joshi, Danielle Foushée

5:45-6:15 p.m. EDT • Daily Mixer PM

5-Minute Mixer session focused on research

Thursday, Aug. 6

COMMUNITY

Daily intro video [asynchronous]

How must our community shift?

Panel: Overload: A talk on mental health and design education [asynchronous]

Kaleena Sales, Shannon Doronio, David Walker, Ebonee Lyle

9:30-10:00 a.m. EDT • Daily Mixer AM

5-Minute Mixer session focused on community

11:30-12:30 p.m. EDT • Roundtable: Exploring dualities: Design educators transition to learning designers

Alana Hawkins, Sudebi Thakurata

1:00-2:00 p.m. EDT • Roundtable: Developing a collective accord for community engagement in design education

Rich Hollant (with Kathy Mueller, Pouya Jahanshahi, Zoe Chatfield)

2:30-3:30 p.m. EDT • Panel: Who gets to teach?*

*Includes ASL Interpreter
Jacinda Walker, Paul Nini,Mari Mater O’Neill, Aisha Densmore-Bey

4:00-5:00 p.m. EDT • Roundtable: From local to global

Natacha Poggio, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, Alejandra Zambrano

5:45-6:15 p.m. EDT • Daily Mixer PM

5-Minute Mixer session focused on community

Friday, Aug. 7

SUMMIT CLOSING

1:00-2:00 p.m. EDT • Live closing session + call for submissions*

*Includes ASL Interpreter
MC: Lee-Sean Huang, AIGA Design Education Manager
Liese Zahabi + Alberto Rigau + Ali Place, SHIFT Summit Co-chairs
AIGA Design Educators Community Steering Committee

2:30-3:30 p.m. EDT • Virtual happy hour