DesignX Conference 2015

October 10-11, 2015

The social, economic, and technological contexts of design are radically changing. The knowledge, methods, and processes addressed by design research and education, however, lag behind, and hence are inadequate to support design to face such changes. In Fall 2014, a small group of design scholars and educators, who gathered at Tongji University for the International Advisory Board meeting of College of Design and Innovation, showed great passion to change the situation. They called their agenda "DesignX," describing it as "a new, evidence-based approach for addressing many of the complex and serious problems facing the world today. It adds to and augments today’s design methods, reformulating the role that design can play." In October 2015, DesignX Conference will be an ideal place to host and to continue this conversation, identifying the nature of the issues and the framework for working on the problems.

The "birth" of DesignX

Here below are the six initiators of DesignX Manifesto.

Ken Friedman, PhD

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies

College of Design Innovation, Tongji University, China

Distinguished Professor, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Ken Friedman is Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies at College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, China, and University Distinguished Professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. He is the editor-in-chief of She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation (published by Elsevier). He was formerly Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design at the Norwegian School of Management and at Denmark’s Design School. His research concentrates on organization, culture and design in the knowledge economy. Working with intermedia and concept art, he was involved in Fluxus in his early years. His work from the 1960s was recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.

Don Norman, PhD

Professor Emeritus Cognitive Science & Psychology

Director of Design Lab

University of California, San Diego, USA

Honorary Professor, Tongji University, China

Don Norman is Professor and Director of Design Lab at University of California, San Diego; Honorary Professor of College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University. He is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, IDEO fellow, former Vice President of Apple, and professor at Harvard, UC San Diego, Northwestern, and KAIST (South Korea). In 2002, he received the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award presented by SIGCHI for his distinguished achievements in both design education and practice in developing the applied science of HCI encompassing cognition, engineering, and design. His recent emphasis is on helping technology companies structure their product lines and business. Today he mainly focuses on design strategy: how designers and design thinking can help drive both incremental and radical innovation with the company. His books include Emotional Design, Living with Complexity, and an expanded, revised edition of Design of Everyday Things. His personal website: www.jnd.org.

Yongqi LOU, PhD

Professor, Dean

College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, China

Yongqi LOU is the Dean and full professor of the College of Design and Innovation at the Tongji University, the Vice President of CUMULUS, the International Association of Universities and Colleges of Art, Design and Media, and the visiting professor at the School of Art, Design and Architecture of Aalto University in Finland. His main research focuses on social design and sustainable design. He plays an active role in promoting interdisciplinary sustainable design education, research and practice internationally. LOU is the executive editor of She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation (published by Elsevier). He currently serves on the boards of Alta Scuola Politecnica, Danish Design School Kolding, DESIS, The Gothenburg art and research platform, and Design Issues, among others. His latest book is Design Harvests: An Acupunctural Design Approach toward Sustainability, published by Mistra Urban Futures in Sweden. His works have been exhibited in the Design Museum of Helsinki, the Triennale Design Museum in Milano, and among other prestigious institutions.

Pieter Jan Stappers, PhD

Professor

Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology,

The Netherlands

After an education in experimental physics (MSc 1984), Pieter Jan Stappers made the switch to Industrial Design Engineering at TUDelft, and followed a research path that led from human perception, spatial imagery, Virtual Reality (Ph.D. in 1992), to design tools and participatory design techniques. His current activities as full professor of design techniques (as of 2002) encompass coordinating the Faculty’s Graduate School, being informal director of ID-StudioLab, and heading the research sub-programme on tools and techniques for the conceptual phase of design. Key elements in his work are "research through design," "experiential prototypes" and "context mapping".

Ena Voûte, MSc

Professor, Dean

Faculty of Industrial Design, Delft University of Technology,

The Netherlands

Ena Voûte returned to her alma mater as dean in September 2012, after studying Industrial Design at TUDelft and carrying out her graduation project on innovative packaging at Unilever in the UK. During the 1990s she worked for Unilever in a number of European countries, where she developed launching, branding and marketing strategies for products including Magnum, Becel and Lipton. At the start of this century, she was involved in the establishment of the financial services comparison site Independer as its marketing director and she worked as an innovation consultant at Altuïtion. She went on to work for nine years at Philips Consumer Lifestyle on personal care products and at Philips Lighting in a number of international roles.

Patrick Whitney, MFA

Professor, Dean

Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA

Patrick Whitney is the dean of the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, and is the Steelcase/Robert C. Pew Professor of Design. He has published and lectured throughout the world about ways of making technological innovations more human, the link between design and business strategy, and methods of designing interactive communications and products. His writing is generally about new frameworks of design that respond to three transformations: linking insights about user experience to business strategy, the shift from mass-production to flexible production, and the shift from national markets to markets that are both global and "markets of one." Business Week has profiled him as a "design visionary" for bringing together design and business, Forbes named him as one of six members of the ‘E-Gang’ for his work in human-centered design, Fast Company has identified him as a "master of design" for linking the creation of user value and economic value, and Global Entrepreneur named him one of the 25 people worldwide doing the most to bring new ideas to business in China.

Emerging Practices 2015

Design Education and Research Conference: Activism

October 12-13, 2015

Since 2012, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University has hosted the Emerging Practices Conference (EPC) three consecutive times, discussing themes including "Practices, Values, and Approaches," "Open Design," and "Developing." The conference is devoted to explore varied approaches that are emerging from the intersections between design and other disciplines or domains. It provides the arena for heated debates about challenges ranging from theoretical underpinnings to practical issues, aiming to better support design as an active agency in facilitating inter-disciplinary innovation, industrial transformation, and improving social wellbeing. The main theme for EPC 2015 is "Activism." We seek a radical reformation of design practice, education, and research to enable design to better face the real world challenges and lead social changes proactively.

DesignX 2015 is a by-invitation small-scale conference encouraging in-depth discussion. Its outcomes will be presented in the form of briefings, proceedings and online resources.

Emerging Practices 2015 is open for registration. Please follow the latest news released on Tongji D&I We-Chat Platform (tongji_di), Tongji Design Week We-Chat Platform (tongji_designweek) and the website of Tongji D&I (tjdi.tongji.edu.cn).

Conference Venue

Tongji University College of Design and Innovation

No.281, Fuxin Road, Yangpu District, Shanghai

Tel: (021) 65983432