The Art and Science of DesignInternational conference on Design Education.On 9 May 2011 the international conference The Art and Science of Design will take place at the Faculty of Design and Art of Free University of Bolzano-Bozen. The conference is being organised by Professor Dr.-Ing. habil. Jörg H. Gleiter and Prof. Antonino Benincasa.

“Everything is design”, proclaimed Lucius Burckhardt in the eighties, probably not realising how right he would be. Only a few years later, new media technologies and the globalised market began to have a profound impact on design. Thanks to rapid prototyping, digital art, crowdsourcing, tweaking design, generative design and digital crafting, design has shown its face in many new areas. The traditional boundaries between design, architecture, art, cinema, urban planning, landscape design, literature and set design as well as between technical and scientific subjects have evaporated. We can therefore confidently assert that design really is everything. Today more than ever, design is both science and art: the international market and digital processes have radically changed designers’ jobs, their self-awareness and the role they play in society at large.

The Art and Science of Design conference will raise various questions: what does all this mean for the academic training of designers? How can universities and specialised design schools deal with these changes? Diplomas, bachelor degrees, masters and PhD programmes: what are today’s models of educational good practice that manage to take into consideration the new profile of the modern designer, which straddles the line between science and art? What level of internationalisation and specialisation is required? How can benefits provided locally be used in the best way? How can the links between industry and local businesses be developed so as to benefit all three stakeholders (companies, universities and students)? How can individual schools create their own image? How can education react towards research and the fact that designers are increasingly finding themselves in the middle of complex trends of knowledge and materials, but are increasingly becoming generalists and yet are unable to move away from the pressures that the specializations demand? International cooperation? With whom? And how? How will this be financed? And how can the political class be convinced this is a good thing?

Broadly speaking, what will the aims, tools and methods of design education be in the future? The Art and Science of Design conference is inviting representatives from internationally renowned design schools to Bolzano so that a critical and informative exchange of ideas can be held on design education. The invited speakers, from the USA, Japan, Germany and Italy, will present their own design faculties and talk about the work they are doing with their students.

Entrance is free.