Speculating on the Present: Risky Encounters in school-based Design Education

When Gert Biesta (2014) speaks of the beautiful risk of education, he asks that we consider the urgency of creativity, communication, teaching, learning, emancipation, democracy, and virtuosity. Are these the beautiful risks of design education? If so, what could, and might this look like in schools? What can school-based design education offer and why does it matter to the world? Biesta asks us to place risk at forefront of critical pedagogical practice. This panel will consider the big ideas of the possibilities and opportunities for risky encounters, decolonisation of design education and how we can teach being in the world through/as design.

The panel discusses how we exist in the world, and how design education might rethink, reimagine and revisit how design can help us make sense of being in the world. We will explore how being concerned with possibilities, not probabilities, and considering preferences over a set of possible futures might help or hinder attempts to encounter and exist in the world.