Featured Speaker

Rethinking Education

Anna Valtonen, Professor; Rector of Umeå Institute of Design (UID), Umeå University

In today’s changing world, educational institutions basically have two options: to do nothing, wait, and then do something about it reactively when the change around us is so massive we cannot deny it any longer; or, alternatively, to actively participate in this change and to act on it now.

At Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden, we did not want to just talk about the future, we wanted to take a designerly approach and envision what future education in design would be, prototype it, and then act on the insights. This was done through the project Prototyping the Future.

The idea of the Prototyping the Future project was to first crowd-source within the faculty what is happening in the design field and what new areas are developing in it. Then 20 of these areas were further defined into workshop topics, and a one-week workshop was given in each of these areas, facilitated by the best experts we could find globally. All staff, faculty and students participated in the workshops, and reflected on their success. After the week we all had something concrete to work on to build the strategic development of new curricula.

This presentation will look into how you can involve an entire organization in strategic development, and also give you glimpses of the new areas of design that we saw developing.

Biography: Anna Valtonen

Anna Valtonen, Professor, has been the Rector of Umeå Institute of Design (UID), Umeå University, since 2009. Previously, she worked for 12 years for Nokia, most recently as Head of Design Research & Foresight. Anna Valtonen’s research interests are in design & society, its history and future, and the role of designers within. Valtonen also holds many positions of trust within universities, organizations and corporations.

Umeå Institute of Design provides one of the top industrial design educations in the world. Each year, applicants from over forty countries send in their portfolios, with an acceptance rate of less than 10%. Currently, the Institute has enrolled students from 29 different nationalities. The programs, from BA to PhD, in areas such as interaction design, product design, transportation design and design connections, are supported by exceptional research and technical facilities and close cooperation with industry.

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