DESIGN FUTURES ELECTIVES
In addition to the core, there will be several Design Futures Electives, which is the focus of this request for proposals. We are in search of sessions that contextualize, advance and provide practice space for practical skills for university students in designing places of belonging, liberation and healing.
Sessions might explore questions such as:
- What community-driven processes can we learn from to be accountable to communities most impacted by systemic harm in our design processes?
- How do we leverage tools and technologies to surface data-driven insights on community resources, disparities, and needs?
- What organizing methods can we learn from to resist and disrupt current harmful trends and plant the seeds for more generative futures?
- What liberatory practices can we learn from to develop radical and rigorous imagination?
- Where has architecture, design, city planning, policy, or public art been on the leading edge in supporting social movements, and what can we learn from these examples?
- How can we make decisions in alignment with our values? What might guide us if we lose motivation or get lost on our path?
Sessions are often one of the following formats:
- Practice spaces for students to learn about a specific skill and practice applying it in various scenarios
- Immersive sessions for students to practice skills by co-creating something together
- Strategy or networking workshops for students to build relationships and leverage their expertise to develop a strategy together.
These are just examples; we are very open to your ideas and what you think future leaders in community-driven design and spatial justice need to know! All topics and approaches that are applicable to students dealing with the built environments are welcomed.
Strong workshop proposals must:
- Fit into a 2.5 hour or 1.5-hour time slot.
- Be interactive experiences for all participants. While it may be necessary to have a lecture style introduction to the workshop, it should be brief and prepare the students for some kind of hands-on, interactive learning experience. Any lecture-style portions should not exceed 15 minutes on a 1.5 hour session or 20 minutes in a 2.5 hour session.
- Go beyond theory and emphasize practical applications so students walk away feeling clear about how they might apply the workshop to their design practice.
- Create connections between participants
- Be appropriate for a multi-disciplinary group. While the majority of participants are attending schools of design and/or planning, we also have participants coming to this work from different fields such as urban ecology, engineering, public health and others.
- Directly address how your own work addresses systems of harm
- Provide a “takeaway for practice” handout or resource (e.g. best practices, case studies, community engagement workshop planning, etc.)
- Be accessible to folks with different access needs (e.g. visual, mobility, sensory). Design Futures will be collecting access needs requests during registration and will share any relevant needs with facilitators.