August 3, 2020

UofSC Design Professor Meena Khalili and members of the AIGA National Design Educators Community have programmed a virtual national conference for design educators titled SHIFT. The conference is free and will be streamed via Zoom with both asynchronous programming and synchronous components to include workshops and roundtables, including ASL interpretation for many events. Event participants range in rank and tenure at established universities and colleges from all over the country. The AIGA Design Educators Community's aim through this program is to support design educators around the framework of Teaching, Research, and Service.

"The events of 2020 have required design educators to SHIFT many things: priorities, expectations, formats, locations, modalities, and perspectives. The suddenness of these shifts has also revealed many previously unseen or overlooked aspects of design education: weaknesses, biases, inequities, issues of accessibility—as well as opportunities for innovation and evolution. Our present moment has left us with lingering questions about what it means to be a design educator and what our role might look like in the future. [...] This summit strives to bring together as many different voices and perspectives as possible, especially those that have been historically underrepresented in conversations around design education. In this watershed moment it is imperative that we pause, listen, reflect, and learn from each other. Through dialogue and discourse, we aim to explore pluralistic answers to the following questions: How must our teaching shift? How must our research shift? How must our community shift?"

The conference begins August 3 and continues through August 7, 2020.

You can register for SHIFT: Virtual Summit online at https://educators.aiga.org/shift-2020/