Spanning Design Boundaries
April 16-17, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
We are pleased to announce the second event in the NSF Interdisciplinary Graduate Design Workshop Series, which will take place at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, April 16-17, 2009.
Funded by NSF with matching from the partner institutions (University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Penn State, and Stanford University), this series of workshops will explore trends and recent developments in interdisciplinary graduate design education. The workshop series is a continuation of the NSF Interdisciplinary Design Workshop held in Washington, DC, in May 2008. The first event of the workshop series was hosted by University of Michigan/Design Science Program on the topic of "The Design Discipline".
At Northwestern, the workshop will explore different themes of design and their interconnections. We assume a restriction of design to situations that involve interaction with people. We identify four major themes: Human Factors and Ergonomics, Engineering Design, Industrial Design, and Human Centered Design (HCD: although this could be easily thought of as a subset of any or all of the other three). This by no means exhausts the demarcation of relevant design themes for, among others, it fails to list Interaction and Experience Design, Human-Computer Interaction, the distinction between products and services, and the design of organizations and processes. However, we believe a broad approach to these four themes covers everything, including these topics: in the resulting discussion, you might prove us to be wrong. Design also has at least three viewpoints: Design as art, as a practical discipline, and as a research endeavor. It is important to distinguish these approaches because many an argument results from failure to recognize that the underlying premises are different.
The one and an half day workshop will start by attempting to characterize these four approaches and three viewpoints. We then ask the participants to create an ideal interdisciplinary graduate design curriculum, assuming zero institutional or cost constraints. The goal is to derive some common themes that as many as possible can agree are at the heart of design, plus the variants that would lead us to distinguish among the emphases and skills of the specialties. It is too much to hope for uniform agreement. But perhaps we can reach a deeper understanding of the issues. As a final activity we will discuss how we can proactively work together to accomplish our education and research objectives. In the late afternoon of Day 1, all attendees will be invited to join Design: Chicago, which is an annual event with the support from the Northwestern School of Engineering, in an effort to better organize Chicago's vibrant design community.
Participation in the workshop will be limited to 50 attendees and will require submission of the online application and commitment to attending the entire workshop. Selection will be based on having a broad, diverse group that best addresses the theme of this workshop and that provides also cohesion over the conduct of the entire workshop series. The selected attendees will be eligible for travel support, which covers up to $500 cost of hotel accommodation and flight (or other means of transportation).
Priority for attendance will be given to applications received prior to February 8th, 2009. Selected attendees will be informed prior to February 27th, 2009.
