2025 Design Educators Conference Proceedings: ShiftShaping
The 2025 Design Educators Conference brought together design educators, researchers, practitioners and students in Toronto, ON, on October 3, 2025, to explore a field in motion. Organized in partnership with George Brown Polytechnic and the Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD), the conference created a shared space to take stock of design education with both urgency and care.
The proceedings from a specially selected group of contributors have now been compiled and are available to download.
The conference theme, ShiftShaping, invited participants to treat uncertainty as material: a canvas for innovation, a condition that demanded experimentation, and a context in which failure could be understood as an active ingredient in learning and evolution.
Presenters and contributors explored questions such as: How do we teach otherwise when conventional pedagogical norms reproduce hierarchy or deficit thinking? What kinds of design education become possible when we take language, cultural plurality, and lived experience seriously as design material? How can assessment enable growth and creative risk rather than amplify fear?
Contributors shared essays, structured reflections, and workshop frameworks organized across five sections: Equity and Intercultural Pedagogies; Making, Language and Typography; Assessment and Motivation; Story, Media and Co-Design; and Critical Provocations in Design Education.
A big thank you to those involved in the writing, reviewing, editing and designing process:
Peer Review Committee
- Ana Rita Morais, George Brown Polytechnic
- Hyein Lee RGD, Emily Carr University of Art + Design
- Molly Hill RGD, Conestoga College
- Angela Norwood RGD, York University
Editors
- Ana Rita Morais, George Brown Polytechnic
- Hilary Ashworth, Association of Registered Graphic Designers
Proceedings Design
- Kristine Do, George Brown Polytechnic
- Jasper Fleras Student RGD, George Brown Polytechnic
Brand Identity
- Kristine Do, George Brown Polytechnic
- Audrey Nickerson Student RGD, George Brown Polytechnic
- Yi Jou Esabelle Chen Student RGD, George Brown Polytechnic
To download the publication, click here.
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