The design industry’s relationship to the field of business has long been established and continues to become further entangled each year. But designers aren’t just satisfied with only disrupting the business sector—they’re keen to disrupt the social sector too. Unfortunately, the weaknesses baked into the discipline of design (that have been present from the start) are readily exposed when designers enter complex social issues and treat them like any other human-centered innovation challenge. The lack of a moral framework, let alone a set of ethical guidelines, put designers at great risk of doing more harm than good.
Kaleena Sales is a professor of graphic design and Chair of the Department of Art & Design at Tennessee State University. Her design writing and research centers on Black culture and aesthetics.
The Career City Limits Speaker Series is BACK and better than ever with both virtual and in-person options! These sessions are your opportunity to connect directly with representatives from top companies in the nation seeking creative talent just like you.
The School of Design and Creative Technologies invites all of our students, faculty, & staff to a Popsicle Pop-Up Party on Friday, August 26th.
The Game Development and Design Program invites you to Level UP, the first in-person showcase in 3 years! Explore multiple levels of gameplay, computer graphics, soundscapes, and immersive experiences from UT students across Arts and Entertainment Technologies, Computer Science, and Radio-Television-Film.
Evolution is a collaborative design laboratory facilitating interdisciplinary experimentation in dance performance. Choreographers from the Department of Theatre and Dance join with concert and event lighting designers from the School of Design and Creative Technologies and composers from the Butler School of Music and throughout the University to create short dance works for the concert stage. This public showcase is presented in the B. Iden Payne Theatre each spring.
Design Thinking is a reactive framework. It focuses on symptoms rather than causes and thus lacks the capability to understand structures. This blindness is not an error of the framework but rather a feature that was intentionally constructed. By manufacturing Design Thinking in this way, it can more easily position itself as a universal tool for solving any type of problem because it can ignore the larger and more systemic nature of issues by focusing on a smaller facet of the problem. Design Thinking masks itself as a state-of-the-art schema because of its purported efficiency, however, its sole purpose is to generate innovation in the commercial sphere. (Seitz, 2020, p. vi)
Emergent Mindsets for Sustainable “Impact”
As the field of design has evolved, so have the complex environments where social-impact designers work to apply their expertise. For practitioners in this field, the design of a promising intervention is often outmatched by the pace upon which society “uncovers” a new dilemma; in many instances, the source of this issue can even be traced to an older, now unsustainable design-intervention. In collaboration with the ways many of us have started to adopt more environmentally-friendly practices for material-use and manufacturing processes, this talk will provide an overview of important attitudes and approaches we should consider in an effort to not only promote “social-sustainability” but a positive “impact” in people’s lives.
Interested in career opportunities at Expedia Group? This is your opportunity to learn more, speak directly with them, and ask questions! Brought to you by Industry Relations in the School of Design and Creative Technologies.