What is the current state of change in design studies? What role will a focus on the common good play in design studies at German universities in 2024? After the iF Design Foundation gathered initial insights from a nationwide survey in 2022, the picture was to be updated two years later.
What drives real change? The fifth part of the project series addresses the multifaceted concept of innovation – beyond buzzwords and short-term trends. The focus is on how designers can create sustainable, socially relevant innovations. Participants will explore approaches that understand innovation not just as technological development, but as a holistic process with responsibility, vision, and impact.
Creativity is naturally part of design – yet it's worth taking a closer look at this central concept. As the concluding impulse in the project series, this workshop focuses on how creative processes can be initiated, supported, and reflected upon. Participants will explore different perspectives on creativity and how intuition, uncertainty, and analytical thinking can be productively combined in design education.
What public value do design programs in Germany have? To what extent are design programs geared toward making a significant contribution to strengthening the common good? We examined these questions for the first time in 2022. Two years later, we updated the picture: Has the common good become even more important in design programs in 2024?
Leadership is one of the personal skills that are particularly important as so-called soft skills for successful professional practice. This aspect of personal development plays a crucial role in overcoming the challenges that arise from an orientation towards the common good. That's why this event is dedicated to values-based and sustainability-oriented leadership as well as public value.
Artificial intelligence was already identified by the design community in the white paper study (2015-2020) as a core competency for future designers. In this event, approaches to teaching this new technology in design education were developed.
The most important demands for future design studies published in the 2021 White Paper include those that relate to aspects of personality development. The thesis is that professional success in the future will depend on personal qualities and skills that do not count as professional expertise in the narrower sense. This event focuses on resilience, emotional intelligence, analytical thinking and critical judgment in order to integrate these topics into design teaching.
This free publication documents a multi-day event in which the status quo of design was critically questioned. It brings together four fundamental theses and marks the starting point for examining the future of design and thus design education through the iF Design Foundation.
The research project “Designing Design Education” started in 2015 with a simple question: Clearly, the professional practice of design is undergoing significant change. What consequences will this have for design teaching if it does not want to chase these changes but rather actively shape them? The first phase consisted of an inventory of the status of research and publications, the second phase consisted of 100 interviews on site in Europe, Asia and the USA.
The third research phase of the “Designing Design Education” project consisted of a series of multi-day events in Europe, USA, Asia and Africa. In Gmund, Pasadena, Kyoto and Johannesburg, the invited participants responded to the findings of the 2016 study (“Around the World in 80 Questions”). Building on this, they developed different concepts for studying design that fit into the respective cultural, political and economic contexts.
