Debating Visual Knowledge (Oct 2014, Pittsburgh USA)

Dates: 3-5 October 2014: Debating Visual Knowledge
Location: Pittsburgh, PA, University of Pittsburgh
Contact: debatingvisualknowledge@gmail.com
Deadline for submissions: 11 April 2014

A symposium organized by graduate students in Information Science and History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh.

Visual knowledge and visual literacy have become pressing concerns across a variety of academic disciplines and areas of creative production. These concerns are shaped by the fluid definitions of “visual knowledge” and the multiple ways in which it manifests. Many forms of visual knowledge have capabilities that are not shared by language. This knowledge is produced, mediated, and distributed by a number of different objects, tools, media, and technologies. This symposium seeks to broaden understandings of intellectual and creative work by interrogating the theorization, production, use, and historicization of visual knowledge. We envision the event as an exploratory lab, comprising scholarly and creative projects that engage with these questions.

AIGA Design Educators Conf: Geographics: Design, Education, and the Transnational Terrain (Dec 2012, Hawai’i USA)

Dates: December 13–15, 2012
Location: The East-West Center and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu, Hawai‘i; USA
Contact: Stuart McKee at sdmckee@usfca.edu.
Deadline for proposals: 1 Feb 2012

For many design educators working in different parts of the world today, design practice is taking place in what may be called a transnational context. The boundaries that define the field of higher education have become increasingly fluid, and professors, students, programs, and curricula are moving back and forth between distant regions of the world as never before. The design projects, research, and institutions that result retain a unique cultural complexity because they promote meanings and values that often transcend the cultures and boundaries of the nations within which they originate.

The conference Geographics: Design, Education, and the Transnational Terrain will provide international design educators the opportunity to share examples of design projects and programs that have been implemented within a transnational context, while allowing others to present theoretical or reflective positions about what it means to design within a transnational context today. The conference will also be open to presentations from practitioners who design within transnational contexts and who view design as a strategic framework for intercultural collaboration and intersection. The conference will use the term “transnational” to describe the ways in which designs moves through a wide range of contemporary and historical geographic contexts, including the movement of design between multiple nations and other geopolitical entities; the movement of design between peoples who define themselves as belonging to different geopolitical entities, regardless of their location or national affiliation; and the movement of design against the constraints of any particular national, international, or global geographic construct.