Themes & Topics 2019-04-08T07:20:55+00:00

6 Themes 108 Topics
Explore the themes and their related topics using the boxes.

Design for Earth
In the midst of the Anthropocene, how can we transform our living environments to respect the capacity of ecosystems and, even more, restore their balance and reveal their potential? Humans are indeed part of nature and, as such, are as fragile as our living environment.
Beyond responding to emergencies and disasters or immediate conditions, the design disciplines can also offer broader, sustainable approaches to shape the world for the long term. Going beyond short-term, market-driven needs can allow designers to drop conventions, look at their work on a different scale and become agents of change who can generate alternatives to the status quo.

1
Questioning greenwashing:
2
Facing the technological dilemma:
3
Digital aftermath:
4
Design, manufacturing and environmental challenges:
5
Responsible design and sustainable society:
6
Design and the sharing economy:
7
Holistic design solutions:
8
Sustainability through collective action:
9
Sustainable design through creative practice, science, technology and nature:
10
Territory, performance, resilience:
11
Density and proximity:
12
Environmental methodologies:
13
Green infrastructure and sustainable services:
14
Growth, planning and urban forms:
15
Rethinking interfaces:
16
Dismantling the human / nature dichotomy: wholeness and immersive reality:
17
Beyond sustainability: regenerating large-scale degraded landscapes:
18
Living degrowth: when habitat returns to nature

Design for Participation
In this era, individuals and groups can take part in social and political life – or all kinds of private or public projects – through a number of public platforms and policies. In this often collaborative and consultative context, what is the role and status of the designer? Design disciplines fundamentally contribute to shaping the virtual and physical public spaces of communities, as well as fostering and shaping culture and heritage, both past and future. How can designers help address issues like inequality or the evolution of participation and representation in the political process and in social life?

19
Design as social action, design activism and disrupting the status quo:
20
Open-source design:
21
Graphic design in the public sphere:
22
Design and empowerment:
23
Methods and processes:
24
Transverse approaches to design:
25
Sustainable urban habitats:
26
Sustainable practices and living:
27
Collaborative and participatory practices:
28
New collectivities (geographical and virtual):
29
Public consultation:
30
Design, diversity and majority:
31
Sensible (sub)urban revitalization:
32
Inclusive planning and design practices:
33
New tools in public participation:
34
Empowering landscapes: designing for democratic energy ownership:
35
Stewardship in the Anthropocene: leadership as strategic design in action:
36
Educating for the future: landscape as the common thread:
37
Landscapes of Power: designing for spatial justice

Design for Transformation
Climatic shifts, seasonal changes, day and night cycles, high tides, low tides and human tides all impose transformative criteria and context to the design of goods, experiences and processes, both for more permanent projects and for more fleeting moments. The evolving nature of the relationship between cities, their surrounding hinterland and global networks of all kinds, also create a need for adapting and rethinking territories and exchanges. New insights, new approaches, new tools and new materials facilitate the increased need to design, redesign or rethink – and therefore make design a source of transformation.

38
Access to knowledge/information in the age of big data:
39
Design in daily life:
40
Decolonizing design:
41
Design’s gender challenge:
42
Acculturation:
43
Public policies:
44
Change management:
45
Future perspectives of interior design as a profession and as a discipline:
46
Interdisciplinary collaboration and co-creation strategies:
47
Seasonal and temporal mutations:
48
Thinking for the long term:
49
The effects of ephemeral projects:
50
The temporality of cities and regions:
51
Post-carbon cities and regions:
52
Urban design in the realm of possibility:
53
Shifting territorial connectivity: ecosystem-centered design:
54
Nature as technology: soil solutions to climate problems:
55
In praise of tree huggers: forests as balance of power

Design for Beauty
From creating useful objects to planning green spaces in urban contexts, design disciplines share a concern for sensible and wise design, in a world in search of meaning and prosperity. The beauty of designed objects, buildings, interiors, cities and landscape isn’t superfluous: it is essential. However, the decision of making them beautiful or not is often political. Furthermore, these perspectives on sustaining wellbeing and making life more than just bearable, oscillate between universal design that reaches across the globe, and inspiration from local realities that can provide more adapted ways to improve quality of life.

56
Quality in a world of quantity:
57
Facing information overload:
58
Developing a culture of empathy and care:
59
Beauty and Identity: a humanistic approach:
60
Spirituality and symbolic design:
61
Ideological design:
62
The value of beauty and sensitivity to space:
63
Interior design for health and well-being:
64
Universal design perspectives:
65
Aesthetics and identity in the 21st century:
66
Media and representation:
67
Approaches to heritage:
68
Remaking the uniform, the unloved, and the banal:
69
Urban rejuvenation: rethinking power:
70
The ethics and aesthetics of the multisensory city:
71
Build it (differently) and “they” will (not) come:
72
Makeshift landscapes: learning from patterns of informality

Design for Sale?
The role of design within modern economic systems can take many shapes and generate often unexpected results – with outcomes that can be significantly better or worse than originally planned. What is the value of design, within the production of goods and the development of society as a whole? While design can be used for commodity, it can also be used for the common good, with the latter implying a more political design voice, driven by values and ideals, rather than a solely monetary purpose.

73
Designers in decision-making processes:
74
Design as a resource:
75
Design and new economic models:
76
Design and the commons: beyond pro bono?:
77
Sustainable products, low-cost products:
78
Healthcare and design:
79
Value and vision:
80
Economic viability of interior design:
81
Branded design:
82
What is the value of design?:
83
The risk of design:
84
Form follows finance:
85
Heritage: revitalization without “Disneyfication”?:
86
Innovative practices for real-estate development:
87
Selling city life? Marketing and branding the urban:
88
From Commodifying to Commoning the Land: how First Nations are showing the way:
89
Capitalizing natural resources: taking a stance on environmental change:
90
Opening the Arctic: grounding another spatial paradigm

Design for Extremes
Recent migratory movements are challenging political and design strategies to forecast gradual human migrations between countries and even within one country, through political upheavals and/or as a result of climate change. As rising sea levels change the shape of continents, as new spaces become more accessible and others unliveable, the capacity to adjust to such dramatic shifts will become even more essential. Canada, reaching all the way to the Arctic, will be at the heart of those changes. How can design solutions support these sociological, economic or political migrations?

91
Propaganda and destruction:
92
Visual communication in a context of geopolitical crisis:
93
Design for peace:
94
Marketing and social exclusion:
95
Crisis as reason for action:
96
Design at the intersection of global trends:
97
Technological/temporal spaces:
98
Crisis and resilient design:
99
Extreme spaces:
100
Natural disasters (predictable or not):
101
Man-made disasters:
102
Socio-economic and political contexts:
103
Resilient cities and territories:
104
Urban design for temporary settings and crises:
105
Where extremes coexist:
106
Urbanization beyond cities: the hinterland, extended:
107
From the margins to the center: global warming and human habitats:
108
Landscapes of violence: reconciliatory ambitions