The International Conference for Design Education Researchers series was inaugurated in 2011 as a one day symposium which held in Paris in 2011, attracted over 100 delegates with 12 speakers. The 2nd conference which was held in Oslo 2013 attracted 278 delegates from 43 countries. The 3rd conference was held in Chicago. The 4th was held in London. The 5th conference was held in Ankara.

6th International Conference for Design Education Researchers | LEARNxDESIGN 2021

This International Conference for Design Education Researchers is a springboard for sharing ideas about contemporary design education research.

The overall theme for the conference is Engaging with Challenges in Design Education. The conference will be hosted by Shandong University of Art & Design, China. The conference dates:

Pit Stop :: Thursday 23 September 2021
Paper, Case-study and Workshop presentations :: 24–26 September 2021
Excursions :: Monday 27 September 2021

Shandong University of Art & Design conference venue is located in Jinan. The city has a long history of more than 3000 years and it is the ‘home’ of Confucius. Jinan is situated at the northeast of China with over 8 million inhabitants.
There are over 2,000 design schools in China. Shandong University of Art & Design (SUAD) is amongst the top ten design schools in China. It has over 7,000 students and close to 700 staff members. The university offers 53 Bachelor’s degree and 20 Master’s degree programmes. In 2018 SUAD received 75,000 student applications, of these 1,600 students have been accepted.

In 2016 the Chinese Ministry of Education has included the design discipline to the “Special Catalogue of General Colleges and Universities” with the aim of scaling up design education. Since 2016, more than 2,000 institutions have been delivering design programmes. Every year more than 540,000 students enroll into design programmes.

The number of students studying design and related majors in the school now exceeds 2 million. The design discipline has become the most prominent one in more than 140 first-level disciplines and more than 90 undergraduate majors in China.

Professor Xu, a scholar in design education, stated that under the current economic and social development situation in China, the scale of design education will increase in the future. Thus, design researcher educators will have a profound impact on the future of China’s design discipline development. Especially now that countries around the world generally emphasize the innovation-driven. Therefore, the discipline of design should be based on the needs of social development and conceive a knowledge prospect that is forward-looking and realistically connected in the future. This is a key issue that cannot be avoided by design education today.

To address the outlined context, we would like to propose the following 2021 conference theme: Engaging with Challenges in Design Education.