Changing the Change: Design Visions, Proposals and Tools

An international conference on the role and potential of design research in the transition towards sustainability.

Organised by Co-ordination of Italian Design Research Doctorates in cooperation with the Conference of Italian Design Faculty Deans and Programme Heads, in the framework of WORLD DESIGN CAPITAL TORINO 2008.  This is an ICSID initiative of the IDA, endorsed by the Design Research Society

The conference "Changing the Change" seeks to make a significant contribution to a necessary transformation that involves changing the direction of current changes toward a sustainable future. It specifically intends to outline the state-of-the-art of design research in terms of visions, proposals and tools with which design can actively and positively take part in the wider social learning process that will have to take place. At the heart of the conference, design researchers will present concrete and documentable research results. This will be complemented by invited keynote speaker presentations that will help paint a clearer picture of the common ground from which the conference will take off.

AIMS

The conference seeks to make a significant contribution to the twofold transformation underway. It specifically intends to outline the state-of-the-art of design research in terms of vision, proposals and tools with which design can actively and positively take part in the wider social learning process that we refer to as "changing the change." The conference has a double aim:

• to consolidate a design research culture and practice oriented towards a constructive critical attitude able to reach all design disciplines. The conference intends to focus on the way in which the question of "changing the change" is present and widespread throughout the research community and in relation to all design fields: from product design to communication design; from interior design to interaction, service and strategic design; from social design to fashion design
• to outline the state-of-the-art of contributions that design research is today able to bring to social conversation about the future. The conference seeks to bring visibility to significant results. This with particular attention to visions of the future, to feasible solutions and to tools to help bring them into being. It will also enable us to make of the conference and its published output a tool for communication with the outside world; a tool able to demonstrate what design research can offer today to help re-orientate the transformation underway.
  

In view of these aims, the conference will centre on the presentation of research results that could make a positive contribution to 'changing the change'. It will welcome contributions that take as their starting point transformations that have already taken place and those underway, and the necessity to re-orient them towards more sustainable outcomes. It hopes to present the widest range of possible world visions, feasible proposals and the design tools that could bring them into being.