Workshop Title:
A Sense of Philly
Stephan Clambaneva, IDSA and Daniel Goddemeyer, IDSA

A Sense of Philadelphia aims to explore and encourage a more aware and sensory interaction with our urban environment. We will explore how we, as designers, can create richer interactions with our cities by utilizing and experiencing it with our five human senses of touch, taste, smell, sound and sight. In the workshop we will create inspiration and ideas through storytelling and sharing to come up with urban interventions that address specific wants and needs by creating new sensory interactions with the metropolitan fabric of our cities. By sharing personal sensory experiences from your own city—that recently inspired you or even represents home for you—you will create designs through storytelling that emphasize and translate this experience to the context of Philadelphia. You will develop urban sensory interventions as conceptual leave-behinds for Philadelphians to emphasize and encourage a more sensory awareness and interaction with their city that makes use of the five senses of touch, taste, smell, sound and sight.

Workshop Title:
Define & Connect: Branding You and Connecting to Your Target Market
ANGELA YEH, IDSA

Whether you are a designer seeking a job, a design director representing an account or a consultancy owner looking to land the next client project, we all have the same challenges: 1) Knowing how to define your value proposition, 2) Conveying that message to your ideal target market in the best way to deliver the right results and 3) Becoming so comfortable and successful at networking that you draw your ideal target market to you. Angela Yeh has branded some of the leading professionals from seasoned executives to young budding talent as well as consultancies. In this workshop, Yeh will help you understand how to best define yourself and walk you through the steps to represent yourself in the best light to reach your goals.

Workshop Title:
Pragmatic Sustainable Design for Product Designers
MATHIEU TURPAULT and JOEP MEIJER

The ability to integrate environmental performance measurements and sustainability goals into your design is a task that is becoming more the norm. Mathieu Turpault of Bresslergroup will show you how he has been integrating ecodesign strategies in various stages in the design process at the Bresslergroup. He will show you an example of an actual project with an overview of considered and applied ecodesign strategies. Joep Meijer of Sustainable Minds will introduce the concept of the ecodesign strategy wheel to frame the discussion, and will take you through a couple of hands on exercises using Sustainable Minds software. If you want to start to model ecodesign strategies and achieve credible guidance during your design process, then come join us for a workshop where we show you that ecodesign can be pragmatic, actionable and deliver credible greener products.

Session Title:
Designing Graduate Business Education
NATALIE W. NIXON, Ph.D.

Strategic design is a way to innovate graduate business education by developing hybrid thinking and integrative approaches to framing problems and identifying opportunities in a business context. In this session, Natalie W. Nixon, Ph.D., will share some of the ways that design thinking, business models and systems thinking are integrated into a master’s degree launching at Philadelphia University in fall 2012. Strategic design integrates the analytical intelligence of business with the creative intelligence of design to develop business solutions that are more functional, elegant, creative, efficient and profitable. The integrative design method traditionally used to design products is transferred to the design of innovative business opportunities in marketing, services, operations, finance and management.

Session Title:
The Biggest Innovation Driver in 2012: Environmental Performance
JOEP MEIJER

Global manufacturing executives agree: environmental performance will lower costs, increase revenues and provide real competitive advantage. The combination of consumer demand, potential financial savings, constrained resources, regulatory requirements, long-term business viability and company values have already caused companies to increase their greener product efforts from informal investigation to corporate initiative. How are companies integrating “greener” into product development and how does ecodesign happen? It requires new knowledge, processes and tools. In this session, we will explore use cases and examples of how this is happening.

Session Title:
Magic and Logic
ERIC CHAN

With technology rapidly evolving in the interactive world of sensors and the cloud, appliances are getting smarter, devices are constantly connected and the ways we interact with these devices are no longer restricted to just physical form factor or tactile interaction. Today, in the era of social media, cloud computing and smart, flexible interfaces, designers must harness new tools which are now external to the traditional practice of design, and which force us to reckon with entirely new modes of thinking about how people interact with technology and how to offer meaningful user-centric design in this new context. We will explore how to simplify our complex world as we define new roles for the designer to play in the creation of products and services in the new global climate.

Session Title:
What Designers Ought to Know About Research
STEPHEN B. WILCOX, Ph.D., FIDSA

The presentation will make the case that designers need to know two things about research—how to do some types of research and how to work with professionals who do other types of research. There are many sources of information regarding how designers should conduct research. This paper will focus on what designers should not do when conducting research, namely, pitfalls to avoid. Examples of pitfalls to be discussed include failing to:

• Meet the expectations of research consumers
• Integrate research into the design process
• Avoid jumping to conclusions
• Treat the presentation of information as another design problem

Session Title:
Scalar Framing for Complexity
JAMER HUNT

Scale is a familiar construct to all designers, and yet its usefulness is frequently overlooked. This presentation will explore the phenomenon of scale and demonstrate the ways in which scalar framing can be used as an analytical and generative tool to address innovation within large, complex issues of social change. How can we better understand the principles of scale so that we can use it as a method for framing socio-technical systems and their behaviors across various local and global contexts? Hunt will demonstrate the ways in which design problems can be productively reframed by changing our orientation to their scalar properties and by thinking in terms of scale and scale shifts.

Session Title:
Green Design for Everyone
JAMIE SALM

Jaime Salm shares his experience developing MIO; a design company that develops furnishings, accessories and design strategies focused on environmental sustainability and social responsibility.

Session Title:
Mbrela Project and the Future of Education
GÖTZ UNGER and STEWART BIBBY

The Product and Industrial Design Programs at the University of Lincoln (UK), Philadelphia University and San Jose State University have been aiming to address the future of education within an international environment and have been working together on collaborative projects since 2009. The association between these institutions has enabled the studios to develop projects and share valuable cultural and practice-based experiences. In particular, the design and manufacturing networks associated to each of the studios has been a beneficial resource in the development of an international design community. The project has often had to address a variety of challenges, but the subsequent benefits to the educational experience have strengthened the design thinking and encouraged development. During 2011, the collaboration presented joint outputs in Milan, New York and Baltimore and is to exhibit in the UK during 2012. UK and US members of this international collaboration look to share their experiences.