As we navigate the end of a pandemic, we are rediscovering our nature for resilience, courage, and adaptability while being confronted by limitations in our personal, professional, and technological capabilities. In the new normal, we are also revisiting old and new conversations addressing long overdue issues and turning them into actions. On the positive side, barriers that seemed insurmountable before are breaking down. More importantly, as the world becomes smaller due to the shift to virtual connectivity, more opportunities are evolving to foster collaborations across disciplines and reach far corners of the globe. Designers now have more tools to become change-makers within the academic and professional realms through initiating, engaging, and collaborating in practices that create positive experiences. In this spirit, we are inviting contributions addressing overarching considerations in design education and practice that embrace sustainability in its broadest sense. Recorded September 22, 2021

Digital 3D modeling and fabrication tools are used in myriad sectors from education to industry, enabling the creation of prototypes and low or even high-volume production. Given their wide usage, can CAD and CAM be considered to support the transition from a military mindset to a student and eventually to a civilian? Around 20% of veterans adjust just fine, but the majority require support services during and through their transitions. Veterans undergo different stressors that can trigger episodes of PTSD. In addition to traditional counseling, the use of CAD and CAM can help with stress management. Veterans can benefit from design therapy – imagining and creating whatever they want through digital modeling and fabrication. In this ongoing case study, design is a medium used to aid veteran students in stress management, academic continuity, and accomplishing career goals. Recorded September 22, 2021

Inclusive design uses the understanding of diversity in populations to create products that are accessible and usable by as many people as reasonably possible. Collaboration with interdisciplinary professionals and the users of the design products or environments are crucial partners in the inclusive design process to better understand design goals, criteria and needs, streamline the design process, and improve outcomes. A 15-week experience demonstrated the benefits and areas of friction in the design process through a collaborative design project with visual communication design students, occupational therapy doctoral students, and an organization serving individuals with intellectual disability. The design project aimed to increase engagement and participation in the cooking process for adults with intellectual disability through the creation of an accessible cookbook and user testing of prototypes to improve functionality of future iterations. Lessons learned from the experience are discussed to inform future design collaborations with users and professionals from different disciplines. Recorded September 22, 2021

Design-focused research has shown how diversity-related considerations are central to the design process; yet and still, racially minoritized individuals are largely absent from the field of professional design. Such existing disparities in racial representation are not due to a shortage of potential designers of color, rather a lack of access to design education and resources within racially minoritized communities. Grounded in the no=on that teaching design thinking aids individuals in building skills that translate to situations beyond design, expanding the reach of design education would be beneficial to racial minorities' personal development. This paper explores the development and application of a design toolkit to facilitate design education in focal communities. Minorities’ Opportunity to Learn Design (MOLD) is an equity-driven platform that delivers a unique experience to design thinking and learning. Using an exploratory sequential approach, this study examines the impacts and values of MOLD in real-world settings. Recorded September 22, 2021

This research inquiry considers product development stakeholder’s knowledge to increase the relevance of patent disclosure content for more successful patents and business competitiveness. This empirical research uses a mixed method questionnaire to gain insight from product development experts that include design, marketing, engineering, upper management, entrepreneur and legal representation. The subset of collected participant data that is the subject of this paper is focused on challenges with gaining access to the team’s relevant information for inclusion in patents. Recorded September 22, 2021

A conversation with Cynthia Jih, Efecem Kutuk, Cameron White, and Robert Watters. Recorded September 22, 2021

This visual paper aims to understand and address the lack of equity and inclusion in the current design process, and the disconnect it has caused between designers’ personal values and beliefs and the work they do for their jobs. The design industry is dominated by Eurocentric design, failing to address many social issues society faces, such as racial and gender inequality, climate change, inaccessibility and poverty. As countries around the world face a reckoning with racial injustices and systemic oppression, many design practitioners have started to rethink their roles and responsibilities in our society. What can we learn from activism to transform our way of problem solving to ensure a more equitable and inclusive outcome? This visual paper shares the learnings from a conversation series that strives to understand the intersection between design and social issues, and breaks down a few opportunities in the current design process to evolve design thinking by incorporating elements of social movements. Recorded September 22, 2021

The paper explores a series of important phenomena that have concurred to a global crisis, and their influence in pushing the design field to a crisis of its own. By acknowledging the scale and significance of humans’ influence on the current state of the planet, and the ways in which design has contributed to aggravate the environmental and humanitarian crisis, this provocative essay critically examines the democratization of design knowledge and the use of decentralized, digital means of production as promising approaches to improving design education and practice moving forward into the 21st Century. Recorded September 22, 2021

Research demonstrates how socially modeled consumer behaviors can be adapted with incentives; to encourage active learning of often tedious recycling rules, we present an interactive game called “WishCycle” for mobile devices that teaches players how to distinguish common plastics by augmenting the recycling experience with game elements. While the player’s attention is focused on a game, data about consumer preferences is compiled on the backend. The experiment gamifies an Implicit Association Test (IAT) mechanism to evaluate when test subjects reflexively categorize comparable stimuli into binary categories, then analyzes for biases. Our game perpetuates desirable behaviors by pairing real items that must be sorted for rewards and immediate feedback for each selection. The combination of recognizable products and positive reinforcement reframes the chore of recycling into a fun experience that educates consumers about sustainable consumption practices while also documenting how players interact with specific items. Recorded September 22, 2021

Exploring the Gender Stereotype Threat Women Experience in Team-Based EDU Settings Recorded September 22, 2021

A conversation with Danielle Chen, Fernando Carvalho, Steve Love, and Bryan Howell Recorded September 22, 2021

How might we use apocalyptic science fiction or Climate Fiction (Cli-fi) to forecast the consequences of design decisions and to inspire a futures-focused approach to design? Participants will play a speculative world-building game designed by the author, and based on themes of climate-fiction, Afrofuturism. The authors were inspired by Afro-rithms from the Future to create this Miro-based ideation and analysis exercise. The goal is to use this as a jumping off point inspire designers to consider how speculative environmental end societal tensions can inspire new ideas and bring new implications to life. Since its creation and initial testing in a Drexel university classroom, the authors have played the Cli-Fi Futures game with design groups, conferences, and universities all over the country. They are happy to bring Clifi Futures to the IDSA Education Symposium and IDC attendees to hear from the Industrial Design community how they see the same being up in classroom and studios in the future. Attendee with leave with access to a Miro Template they may adapt for their own use. Recorded September 22, 2021

In this workshop, Sheng-Hung Lee will present the concept of circular makerspaces, using Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s campus to demonstrate carbon neutrality in makerspaces and introduce the Circular Makerspace Evaluation Toolkit (CMET) to show its process and value—from inspiration to ideation to implementation. During the workshop, Sheng-Hung will provide a series of selected makerspace/lab scenarios on campus, as well as case studies with identified design challenges, for participants to experience, discuss, and learn by using CMET. Recorded September 22, 2021

A discussion on design education, multidisciplinary teams and industry collaborations In this panel we will discuss how design education responds to emergent technology through a multidisciplinary user experience design minor, focusing on cross-disciplinary teams in collaboration with industry. We’ll talk about how to address historical challenges facing design education, such as identifying a comprehensive theoretical framework and its impact on the profession. The session will culminate in how to adapt the educational environment for industry collaboration in a meaningful and productive way to meet ever-changing and challenging circumstances. Recorded September 22, 2021

Dean Victor Ermoli and Professor Kwela Hermanns of Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) along with Marty Gage and Spencer Murrell from Lextant and Priyanka Kat from SCAD will share how they collaborated to develop a certification in front-end design and user-experience research. In sharing this story with you, they hope to encourage more collaboration between design educators and design practitioners. Recorded September 22, 2021