Here’s a pair of interlocking conferences that we’d love to attend. Sadly, we are already booked, but hopefully next time. Still, for those of you with open space and a sense of visual and intellectual adventure, we wanted to share. Check out the blurb below, and if you want more info, check out the website.
WHAT EXACTLY IS DESIGN ETHOS?
While the principal role of visual communication has remained unchanged through modern history, a broader realm of influence must be acknowledged and addressed, and the design community must ask questions that transcend outdated boundaries of culture, influence and motivation. Even as debate surrounding the fundamental issues of form, content and audience has raised the graphic design field to a new level of maturity, visual communicators are confronted with evidence that their work is negatively impacting both socioeconomic balance around the globe and Earth’s vital natural systems.
At the center of this debate is the need for a new ethos that can effectively address matters of global equity, true sustainability, and the downsides to consumerism on an increasingly populated planet. The inattention to social, cultural, and environmental repercussions of an outdated mode of business operation cannot continue. Pragmatic notions of global citizenship are necessary.
This symposium brings together design educators and practitioners who are wrestling with these difficult issues in an attempt to help define the next step in graphic design’s continuing evolution.
COINS 2010 CONFERENCE
The second international conference on Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) brings together a multi-disciplinary international group of practitioners, researchers and students of the emerging science of collaboration.
Sponsored by the Savannah College of Art and Design, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and Wayne State University College of Engineering―Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and hosted by SCAD.
Collaborative Innovation Networks, or COINs, are cyberteams of self-motivated people with a collective vision, to innovatively collaborate by sharing ideas, information, and work enabled by technology. Although COINs have been around for hundreds of years, they are especially relevant today because the concept has reached its tipping point thanks to the Internet. COINs are powered by swarm creativity, wherein people work together in a structure that enables a fluid creation and exchange of ideas. ‘Coolhunting’―discovering, analyzing and measuring trends and trendsetters―puts COINs to productive use. Patterns of collaborative innovation frequently follow an identical path, from creator to COIN to collaborative learning network to collaborative interest network.
The theme of the conference combines a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as social network analysis, social networking, group dynamics, design and visualization, information systems, and the psychology and sociality of collaboration.
ETHICOINOS?
Two conferences in the same town at the same time with opportunities to create meaningful intersections between them: COINS and ETHOS evolved as unique gatherings that bumped into each other, and now we’ve made it easy for attendants of each conference to bump into one another. What does this mean? We’ve coordinated the schedules so that individuals from one conference can attend the keynote speakers from the other conference without paying extra cost, and without having to miss anything from their own conference. What else does it mean? Some of our networking events will have overlaps so that attendees from one conference can mingle with attendees from the other.
Images: ©Design Ethos/COINS/SCAD
