DesignEd Asia Conference 2014 Hong Kong

Date: 2-3 December 2014
Location: Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
Website: http://www.designedasia.com
Deadline for abstracts submission: 27 July 2014

Call for papers: ACTION! – Doing Design Education

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design, Hong Kong Design Institute (member of VTC Group) and Hong Kong Design Centre jointly present the tenth DesignEd Asia Conference. The Conference aims to provide a practical platform for international design educators and professionals to share views, knowledge and experiences on Design Education. It continues to draw hundreds of international design educators, design researchers, practicing designers, design students, and design-related executives.

The DesignEd Asia Conference is a key event under the programme of Business of Design Week (BODW). BODW is an annual flagship event organized by Hong Kong Design Centre since 2002.

This year the theme of the conference is:

ACTION! – Doing Design Education
We must do in order to learn, just as we must learn in order to do.
Designers are doers. Beyond the “skills” and “knowledge” of the respective design disciplines, design education needs to prepare students with the tactical and interpersonal capacity to navigate the world in which they are designing and construct the positive change that they are envisioning. Learning designerly ways of acting in the world involves developing positive habits, honing tacit knowledge and rehearsing ways of conscious action through modes of teaching and learning that transcend traditional “classroom” and “studio” modes of learning.

We are inviting papers exploring different aspects of an action-oriented, experience-oriented, constructivist-grounded view of design education, involving doing the “real thing” in “real time” in the “real world”. In such contexts, knowledge is not seen as being “delivered” by a teacher but is rather constructed by the individual learner and co-constructed by the group of learners. This can imply educators relinquishing a degree control over the structure of the learning process, the environment in which the learning takes place, and the intended “outcomes” of the learning process, in favor of enabling the types of active experiences through which real knowledge emerges. This type of learning can also involve the integration of other people and organizations into the educational process, beyond the binary student-teacher relationship.