Website: Dialectic
Deadline for submissions: 25 January 2018
Are the glasses half-empty or half-full?:
What types of future do you envision for design education, research and the practices they affect? Why?
Authors are invited to submit works for possible publication in the FOURTH issue of Dialectic, a peer-reviewed, refereed, scholarly journal devoted to the critical and creative examination of issues that affect design education, research, and inquiry. Michigan Publishing, the hub of scholarly publishing at the University of Michigan, is publishing Dialectic biannually on behalf of the AIGA Design Educators Community (DEC). The fourth issue will be published between July 15 and September 15, 2018. The deadline for full versions of papers and visual narratives written and/or designed that meet Dialectic Issue 04’s categorical descriptions (see below) is: 5:00 pm CDT, January 25, 2018.
Dialectic’s URL (all content is openly accessible; all articles may be downloaded as .pdfs):
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/dialectic.
Dialectic’s fourth issue will be structured so that it is comprised of two contrasting but complementary “halves,” and will be published in a do-si-do (“back-to-back”) format. This means that our fourth issue will actually have two front covers and no back cover, and that each half of this issue will deliver content that is thematically guided, or framed, by its own distinct, overarching approach. Both of these approaches are unified in that they call for contributors to articulate their particular visions—or facets of visions—for the future of design education, professional practice, research, or confluences between these. Specifically, we are seeking to publish papers and visual narratives that either locate themselves in a dystopian or a utopian future for design, and the worlds that design affects and is affected by.
More simply put, we ask those who submit content for possible publication in Dialectic’s fourth issue to ask themselves what type of future they envision for design, or aspects of it: one rooted in a “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” prognosis, or one fated to fulfill a “Blade Runner: 2049” destiny? Heads up or tails down? What if people who know how to design cool identity marks and the branding systems they populate will soon be replaced by robots? What if people who know how to design cool identify marks will soon be paid their weight in gold every time one of their creations is published in CA, Print, Creative Review, or Graphis?
Dialectic’s Editorial Board suggests that potential authors and visual narrative creators re: Issue 04 begin their thought processes by reading the AIGA’s recent publication “The Designer of 2025,” which succinctly describes seven “trends [and competencies] with long arcs likely to continue into the future.”
Authors and visual narrative creators planning to contribute to our fourth issue are reminded that each submission to Dialectic should be framed in one of the following submission types, which are described in more detail later in this call:
· original visual essays/visually based narratives/visual storytelling
· research papers
· long-form case study reports/case series reports
· position papers
· criticism of designed artifacts, systems, and processes
· reviews of books, exhibitions, and conferences
· survey papers
· theoretical speculations
Each piece that Dialectic will publish must be based on fundamentally sound scholarship and inquiry, written or designed so that is broadly accessible, and focused on topics relevant to its audiences.
Dialectic’s web address for submissions: https://dialectic.submittable.com/submit.
Questions to shape submissions for possible publication in Dialectic Issue 04
The fourth issue of Dialectic seeks papers and visual narratives that would be of interest to a diverse audience of design educators and practitioners. The following array of example prompts—informed within either dystopian or utopian frameworks—have been provided to guide potential authors’ approaches to preparing their submissions:
Dystopian: Is it possible, or probable, that design will ultimately suffer the same diminished state as other professions that are being routinized and supplanted by increasingly sophisticated A.I. and/or algorithmic application? The effects are already being felt in mid-level management activities, civil law practices, and diagnostic medicine.
Utopian: As the work of designers becomes more systemically complex, how will the abilities of individual designers and design teams to assert their unique, creative contributions to these types of projects ensure that human-centered design processes will positively affect an ever-broader array of social, cultural and economic initiatives?
Dystopian: If design were subsumed more fully into business models that privilege best practices over idiosyncratic creativity, of what value would designers be, and, by extension, design education in its most widespread aesthetic/communicative forms?
Utopian: How will design continue to build on and leverage its extant model of decision-making predominantly guided by the tacitly constructed, expert-knowledge of design practitioners across newly created business models that integrate understandings from diverse groups of contributors and stakeholders?
Dystopian: Should the question be asked: are we graduating too many designers? If we are moving forward into a more automated creative landscape, is the optimal balance between supply and demand a third of current graduates, or half, or even less?
Utopian: How should various types of design programs, and the academies and universities within which they are located, expand their capacities to graduate more than the roughly 40,000 degree recipients they currently do (in the U.S.) to meet the demands of a rapidly diversifying, hyper-globalized set of market systems and communities?
Dystopian: Is design sowing the seeds of its irrelevancy by creating robust, creative digital platforms and tools for ‘non-designers?’ Will this transcription of tacit knowledge into embedded software activities empower others at the expense of design practice as it exists today?
Utopian: How should design develop and sustain the use of robust, creative digital platforms and tools with and on behalf of people who do not possess knowledge of design, but who could derive benefit from gaining this knowledge? How could the introduction of these platforms and tools increase opportunities for designers to work effectively across disciplines, and to empower themselves by gaining knowledge from areas outside design?
Dystopian: Given that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 0 to 1% growth rate for traditional graphic design positions through 2024, how should design education programs be altered to prepare students for positions in areas—like networked communications and software development—that offer much higher growth rates across their employment sectors?
Utopian: How should emerging and established designers evolve their learning processes to allow them to invent and utilize technologies that read and respond to what people do in real-time across data-laden landscapes?
Dystopian: How should approaches to design education be altered to remain relevant in university settings where its influence is being lost to or co-opted by other disciplines?
Utopian: How can research—by design, for design, through design—help design students and professionals expand the scope of “the good that design can do” in specific, less-than-desirable, social, technological, economic, environmental and public policy situations in the world?
Dystopian: Like students studying in many other disciplines across contemporary academic environments, design students may well have to change career paths many times over a 50+ year span of time. Given the fact that most university-level design curricula do NOT prepare students for this eventuality, how should design education be facilitated to address this reality, and where should it be located in or between the university and professional communities?
Utopian: How might design professionals best augment their store of knowledge to effectively address the complex, system- and community-based design challenges of the future, especially those that require interdisciplinary collaboration? How should today’s design students be prepared for these types of challenges?
Deadline for submissions: 25 January 2018
What types of future do you envision for design education, research and the practices they affect? Why?
Authors are invited to submit works for possible publication in the FOURTH issue of Dialectic, a peer-reviewed, refereed, scholarly journal devoted to the critical and creative examination of issues that affect design education, research, and inquiry. Michigan Publishing, the hub of scholarly publishing at the University of Michigan, is publishing Dialectic biannually on behalf of the AIGA Design Educators Community (DEC). The fourth issue will be published between July 15 and September 15, 2018. The deadline for full versions of papers and visual narratives written and/or designed that meet Dialectic Issue 04’s categorical descriptions (see below) is: 5:00 pm CDT, January 25, 2018.
Dialectic’s URL (all content is openly accessible; all articles may be downloaded as .pdfs):
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/dialectic.
Dialectic’s fourth issue will be structured so that it is comprised of two contrasting but complementary “halves,” and will be published in a do-si-do (“back-to-back”) format. This means that our fourth issue will actually have two front covers and no back cover, and that each half of this issue will deliver content that is thematically guided, or framed, by its own distinct, overarching approach. Both of these approaches are unified in that they call for contributors to articulate their particular visions—or facets of visions—for the future of design education, professional practice, research, or confluences between these. Specifically, we are seeking to publish papers and visual narratives that either locate themselves in a dystopian or a utopian future for design, and the worlds that design affects and is affected by.
More simply put, we ask those who submit content for possible publication in Dialectic’s fourth issue to ask themselves what type of future they envision for design, or aspects of it: one rooted in a “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” prognosis, or one fated to fulfill a “Blade Runner: 2049” destiny? Heads up or tails down? What if people who know how to design cool identity marks and the branding systems they populate will soon be replaced by robots? What if people who know how to design cool identify marks will soon be paid their weight in gold every time one of their creations is published in CA, Print, Creative Review, or Graphis?
Dialectic’s Editorial Board suggests that potential authors and visual narrative creators re: Issue 04 begin their thought processes by reading the AIGA’s recent publication “The Designer of 2025,” which succinctly describes seven “trends [and competencies] with long arcs likely to continue into the future.”
Authors and visual narrative creators planning to contribute to our fourth issue are reminded that each submission to Dialectic should be framed in one of the following submission types, which are described in more detail later in this call:
· original visual essays/visually based narratives/visual storytelling
· research papers
· long-form case study reports/case series reports
· position papers
· criticism of designed artifacts, systems, and processes
· reviews of books, exhibitions, and conferences
· survey papers
· theoretical speculations
Each piece that Dialectic will publish must be based on fundamentally sound scholarship and inquiry, written or designed so that is broadly accessible, and focused on topics relevant to its audiences.
Dialectic’s web address for submissions: https://dialectic.submittable.com/submit.
Questions to shape submissions for possible publication in Dialectic Issue 04
The fourth issue of Dialectic seeks papers and visual narratives that would be of interest to a diverse audience of design educators and practitioners. The following array of example prompts—informed within either dystopian or utopian frameworks—have been provided to guide potential authors’ approaches to preparing their submissions:
Dystopian: Is it possible, or probable, that design will ultimately suffer the same diminished state as other professions that are being routinized and supplanted by increasingly sophisticated A.I. and/or algorithmic application? The effects are already being felt in mid-level management activities, civil law practices, and diagnostic medicine.
Utopian: As the work of designers becomes more systemically complex, how will the abilities of individual designers and design teams to assert their unique, creative contributions to these types of projects ensure that human-centered design processes will positively affect an ever-broader array of social, cultural and economic initiatives?
Dystopian: If design were subsumed more fully into business models that privilege best practices over idiosyncratic creativity, of what value would designers be, and, by extension, design education in its most widespread aesthetic/communicative forms?
Utopian: How will design continue to build on and leverage its extant model of decision-making predominantly guided by the tacitly constructed, expert-knowledge of design practitioners across newly created business models that integrate understandings from diverse groups of contributors and stakeholders?
Dystopian: Should the question be asked: are we graduating too many designers? If we are moving forward into a more automated creative landscape, is the optimal balance between supply and demand a third of current graduates, or half, or even less?
Utopian: How should various types of design programs, and the academies and universities within which they are located, expand their capacities to graduate more than the roughly 40,000 degree recipients they currently do (in the U.S.) to meet the demands of a rapidly diversifying, hyper-globalized set of market systems and communities?
Dystopian: Is design sowing the seeds of its irrelevancy by creating robust, creative digital platforms and tools for ‘non-designers?’ Will this transcription of tacit knowledge into embedded software activities empower others at the expense of design practice as it exists today?
Utopian: How should design develop and sustain the use of robust, creative digital platforms and tools with and on behalf of people who do not possess knowledge of design, but who could derive benefit from gaining this knowledge? How could the introduction of these platforms and tools increase opportunities for designers to work effectively across disciplines, and to empower themselves by gaining knowledge from areas outside design?
Dystopian: Given that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 0 to 1% growth rate for traditional graphic design positions through 2024, how should design education programs be altered to prepare students for positions in areas—like networked communications and software development—that offer much higher growth rates across their employment sectors?
Utopian: How should emerging and established designers evolve their learning processes to allow them to invent and utilize technologies that read and respond to what people do in real-time across data-laden landscapes?
Dystopian: How should approaches to design education be altered to remain relevant in university settings where its influence is being lost to or co-opted by other disciplines?
Utopian: How can research—by design, for design, through design—help design students and professionals expand the scope of “the good that design can do” in specific, less-than-desirable, social, technological, economic, environmental and public policy situations in the world?
Dystopian: Like students studying in many other disciplines across contemporary academic environments, design students may well have to change career paths many times over a 50+ year span of time. Given the fact that most university-level design curricula do NOT prepare students for this eventuality, how should design education be facilitated to address this reality, and where should it be located in or between the university and professional communities?
Utopian: How might design professionals best augment their store of knowledge to effectively address the complex, system- and community-based design challenges of the future, especially those that require interdisciplinary collaboration? How should today’s design students be prepared for these types of challenges?
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