Description

Talking Circles offer an opportunity to meet other delegates with similar interests and concerns. Delegates self-select into groups based on broad thematic areas and then engage in extended discussion about the issues and concerns they feel are of utmost importance to that segment of the Research Network. Participation is open, encouraged, and supported.

How Do They Work?

The Talking Circles are grouped around each of the conference themes so discussions can focus on the specific areas of interest represented by each theme. 

How to Begin:

Allow members of the group to briefly introduce themselves. 

The facilitator should encourage open dialogue and ensure a collegial and respectful conversation. 

Starting Questions to Assist Discussion

Talking Circle: Who are we?

What is the territory, or scope, or landscape of this thematic area?

What are the burning issues, the key questions for this theme?

What are the forces or drivers that will affect us as professionals, thinkers, citizens, and aware and concerned people whose focus is this particular theme?

What are the future directions (in research, in theory-building, in practice) for this thematic area?

Theme 1: Design Education

On learning to become a designer.

Living Tensions:

• Design Thinking – cognitive modes and learning styles
  
• Problem Solving – recognition procedures, hypothesis development, reasoning processes, solution testing
• Residues – learning from our historical and contemporary design experiences
• Innovation and Creativity – meanings in theory and practice
• Cases – empirical studies of design practices
• Professional Stances – acquiring the designer’s skills, capacities and attitudes
• Methods of Observation – frames of interpretation and criteria for assessment of design
• High and Low Theory – the everyday and theorizing the empirical
• Conceiving Design – complexity, heterogeneity and holism
• Design Pedagogies – teaching and learning in the design professions
• Educational Designs –teacher as instructional designer
• Points of Comparison – precedent, analogy and metaphor in the design process

Theme 2: Design in Society

On the social sources of design and the social effects of design.

Living Tensions

• Design in Social Policy – planning and politics
  
• Health and Safety – public welfare in design practice
• Design as Business – Markets for design and designing for markets
• Human Systems and Cultural Processes – globalization and the design professions
• Design Without Designers – everyday, amateur, organic and living designs
• Design for Diversity – culture, gender, and sexual orientation
• Design Politics – making technologies, spaces and institutions more responsive to human needs
• The ends of Design – pragmatic, aesthetic, and emancipatory
• The Humanistic and Technological –tensions and synergies
• Values, Culture and Knowledge Systems – the role of perspective, subjectivity, and identity
• Cross-cultural Encounters – working on diverse and global design teams
• Niche Markets – working with diverse clients and users