Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Thriving Futures: Papers from The Australian Council of University Art & Design Schools, Oct 2024

The relationship between design education and sustainable development has come a long way since the Stockholm Conference in 1972. Today, universities worldwide acknowledge the critical role of education in progressing the United Nations’s (UN) 2030 Agenda for sustainable development launched in 2019. This article argues that art and design educators must refocus on addressing and problematizing the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) in post-pandemic curricula. To substantiate this call for action, we provide an overview of key shifts in both Australian design education and design for sustainable development (ESD). We report on the contradictions in our audit of references to SDGs in course descriptions for the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Bachelor of Design (Integrated) and student’s project descriptions in the Design Honours programme. Contextualized within the frameworks of social reconstruction and the pluriverse, we outline plans for further initiatives to turn the rhetoric of SDGs into action and develop design education that contributes to just and equitable societies for all people and the planet.

Art theory as taught in Australian higher education still predominantly focuses on Eurocentric artistic practices, methodologies and histories, with practices by First Nations artists and artists of colour often relegated to tokenistic one-off lectures. This approach to syllabus fails to reflect the depth and breadth of contemporary art and creates an inherently imbalanced perspective disconnected from the diverse experiences of students. Simultaneously, students are expressing their own expectations for an empowered and critically reflexive art education. Using the undergraduate art theory course, ReShaping Worlds, as a case study, this collaborative article discusses the importance of developing curriculum that provides students with an expanded perspective on artistic and curatorial practices by decentring hegemonic Eurocentric art narratives and reflecting on positionality. In doing so, we also highlight our roles as arts educators in facilitating and supporting reflexive and critical practice amid climates of political, social and ecological uncertainty.

Across Oceania, design courses within the tertiary education sector remain entrenched in Eurocentric narratives and pedagogical approaches, which omit place-specific contexts, cultural histories, knowledges and diverse ways of designing, including those of First Nations. This concern drove the four authors to create the InterDesigning Network, a supra-institutional network that aims at connecting like-minded educators, practitioners and students. This article reflects on the results of the InterDesigning Network’s first symposium, titled Co-Creating the Praxis of Teaching Decolonial, Intersectional and Pluriversal Design and Histories. As the core team behind the network, we listened and learned from a panel formed by First Nations people that discussed Indigenous design practice, local protocols, connection to place and land, common struggles and ways of integrating Indigenous knowledges into contemporary design education. We also listened and were inspired by the insights shared by another panel made of diverse design educators who discussed how their positionalities and experiences inform their teaching practices. By reflecting on these insights as well as on the rationale behind the formation of a design educators’ network, this article offers actionable suggestions on how to disrupt the status quo for a more diverse and inclusive design education future.

Boundaries in contemporary art practice and education contexts are often conceived as distinctions between disciplines, inscribed through material conventions and discursive traditions. In art, a field that continually touts trans-disciplinarity and post-medium approaches, it is considered productive to occupy multiple disciplinary positions and effectively enlarge or re-draw the territory of possible creative action. This obsession with disciplinary limits reveals a language of spatial metaphors (fields, frontiers and domains) and breaching actions (breaking boundaries, expansion). In this article we highlight how the language of disciplinarity today is spatialized, and premised on notions of imperialist territoriality which are at odds with efforts to decolonize art. We speculate on other ways to approach disciplinarity without theorizing boundaries and their rupture, and re-consider discipline through: ecologies of teaching and learning, an imaginative burrowing under the surface, and working with discipline as an agential material.

The use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education design programmes is expanding, yet there is little formalized approach to its integration. Professionally, generative AI is starting to become an indispensable tool for ideation and prototyping, two fundamental skills taught in design’s studio pedagogy. Yet this digital leap into the future risks leaving design educators behind unless they take a proactive approach to its implementation and present its strengths and weaknesses. This study surveyed 74 design students from an Australian university, exploring their current utilization of generative AI and their projections for its future application in design practice. Findings confirm that generative AI is being used in an ad hoc way by students to speed up the ideation process tempered by a sceptical view of its creative output. A list of generative AI training for integration into the design curricula based on current research and survey results is proposed.