This session took place on April 23, 2021.

This session looks at the potential for economics to be incorporated in design education.

Trust is a staple when it comes to value exchange. Whether conscious or not, it is trust in a system that allows us to participate.

What would it be like if the rituals and practices of our everyday bank card transactions, were more significant? What if we could design for understanding, and have interactions that lead to a deeper understanding of our places in personal, national and global economies?

Design can be a way to reason with space by making abstract thought visible.

The Ainu are one of the indigenous groups that live in Japan. This session will present a brief summary of Ainu Design (particularly textile design), current applications and the links of indigenous design with society and the environment in the Japanese context.

Beyond design interventions, we’re seeing how a nuanced understanding of the political economy of the contexts we intervene is key for an impactful practice.

The circular economy (CE) is a buzzword, presented as a set of approaches to minimize the negative impacts of resource exploitation —in extraction and waste. However, little is said about the distribution and access of resources in a CE, or better said economical aspect of it.

This is a discussion about how we as designers might think about about capturing the value of what we create as designers, and what our participants create with us.

Ainu Mosir is the world of the Ainu people, recognized as indigenous by the Japanese government. By the means of cultural revitalization through legislation and social movements, Ainu creatives have slowly but steadily flourished in recent years.

If you work on digital services, you probably know the term ‘technical debt’. But what about design, research, product, data and service debt – are they all things too?

From representations to simulations, assumptions to ideologies, modelling to wondering, it’s a session that promises no answers and lots of questions about the questions.

Design. A Business Case – Thinking, Leading and Managing by Design (by Brigitte Borja de Mozota & Steinar Valade-Amland) argues the business case for design excellence in organization—whether your mission is to develop new products, services, or procedures or to change existing ones into something better.