Design for Community: Exploring Values and Fostering Bonds of the Design Educators’ Community in St Petersburg

Abstract

This study is driven by a curiosity on what keeps a professional community perceived as valuable and uniting, using the design educators’ community in St. Petersburg in Russia as an example. St. Petersburg is home to five major universities with design programs and a local branch of Designers Association, and has a rich cultural history. Yet, there is currently no clear evidence of academic design activities that would foster an active and bonding design community. Moreover, the scattering of the Russian design community in recent ten months increased the scale of the problem. To address that, we examined the perceived value and the current state of the design educators’ network in St. Petersburg using a human-centred design approach and identified the underlying issues shared by people in the community. These issues aspire us to explore small interventions which will foster a sense of inclusion, belonging and improve the community’s life, and we share and discuss them.

Presenters

Mariia Zolotova
Assistant Professor / Deputy Head, Industrial Design, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Jiangsu, China

Daria Gradusova
PhD Candidate, Faculty of Health, Art and Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Tatiana Aleksandrova
Lecturer, Design, Saint Petersburg University, Russian Federation

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

2023 Special Focus—New Agendas for Design: Principles of Scale, Practices of Inclusion

KEYWORDS

Design Educators, Design Community, Human-Centred Design, Inclusion

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