This past weekend, I was fortunate to attend the Fourth International Conference on Design Principles and Practices with two other Drake students. The conference took place at the University of Illinois-Chicago from February 13-15. The conference is associated with Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal. The conference and journal are cross-disciplinary forums which bring together researchers, teachers, and practitioners to discuss the nature and future of design. Topics discussed at the conference weave between the theoretical and the empirical, research and application, market pragmatics and social idealism, which are presented by a variety of professionals from across the globe. The conference addressed design perspectives and practices of anthropology, architecture, art, artificial intelligence, business, cognitive ergonomics, fashion, graphic design, history, informational systems, industrial design, industrial engineering, instructional design, urban planning and visual design to name a few.
Each day would start off with three main conference speakers, who would present for about 30 minutes each. In my opinion, the two most engaging speakers at the conference were Sol Sender of VSA Partners from Chicago and Marcia Lausen of the School of Art and Design at UIC. Sol Sender lead the creative development of the Obama '08 campaign logo. He discussed the process that his team went through to create the logo, shared examples of alternative logo designs and explained the campaign implementation process. Marcia Lausen has served on local and national boards of AIGA and was the co-founder of the election design initiative of Design for Democracy: a strategic program of AIGA that seeks to improve the quality and clarity of government communications. She discussed her initial conceptualization of the project, her experience in working with government officials while redesigning US election ballots and the implementation of her work. I was excited to see her book, Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design on display at the Art Institute of Chicago during our visit.
After hearing presentations from the three main speakers each morning, the conference would be broken up into several smaller, more intimate, "parallel sessions". These sessions lasted approximately 30 minutes each and were presentations by various professionals from across the world who discussed their written papers that would eventually be included into the next edition of Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal. Several presentations would occur simultaneously in different conference rooms and audience members would choose a topic of interest to sit in on and then travel from room to room between sessions. Parallel sessions would cycle until the end of the day.
I greatly enjoyed going to the parallel sessions. I feel that I was exposed to several new concepts that I had never before considered, which broadened my personal definition of design and challenged my previous perspectives about design research and development. I also had some really great opportunities to see projects and teaching methods utilized by design professors from several different institutions, which allowed me to see what other design students are doing across the globe, the kind of technology they are using and the processes in which they go through in the development of their work. Such parallel sessions in particular are ones that I found to be the most inspirational and motivational.
In addition to attending the conference, I had the opportunity along with two of my peers to explore the city of Chicago. During our stay, we made sure to check out the Art Institute of Chicago & Millennium Park. We also walked up and down Michigan Avenue and explored various restaurants each night after the conference ended. All in all, I think our group had a terrific trip and I would encourage others to check out next year's International Conference on Design Principles and Practices that will take place in Rome, Italy. Check out the site at: http://designprinciplesandpractices.com/Conference-2011/
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