2026 Design Educators Conference

Where: Wilson School of Design at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Richmond, BC

The RGD invites design educators and researchers from across the country to attend our annual Design Educators Conference, which will be held on May 28 in Richmond, BC.

Organized by the RGD in partnership with Wilson School of Design at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the 2026 conference theme is Field Trip, inviting reflection on the ways design education ventures beyond familiar terrains to engage with new contexts of learning.

Field trips are about curiosity, mobility and encountering the unexpected. In what ways might excursions—whether literal or metaphorical—generate new knowledge? What discoveries are inspiring our practice and transforming the ways we teach and understand design?

The conference coincides with DesignThinkers 2026 in Vancouver, which takes place at the Vancouver Playhouse on May 26 and 27.

If you have any questions, please email the RGD's Events Coordinator, Youssef Elgaria, at programs@rgd.ca.

9:40 - 10:35 AM | Opening Keynote

Designing Design: Pedagogy for a New World, presented by Nu Goteh

In a time of urgency and transformation, design education cannot only teach students how to make things; it must help them understand what their work does in the world. What changes when we center dignity not as a value statement, but as a condition we design with and for? Drawing from his path through publishing, research, branding, teaching and social practice, Nu reframes design as a relationship: a practice of care, accountability and meaning-making that holds complexity and restores agency. Weaving personal origin stories, classroom methods and case studies, Nu shares the questions that continue to shape his work. Exploring how tensions between form and care, authorship and community and solution and consequence can be tools for deeper learning and bring new language to design discourse.

About Nu Goteh

Nu is a designer, strategist and educator who envisions conditions for communities to thrive. A recipient of the 2025 National Design Award (Emerging Designer), Nu is the Co-Founder, Managing Partner and Creative Director of Deem Journal and the Founder and Principal of ROOM FOR MAGIC. Nu is at the forefront of an emerging generation of designers who integrate design, culture, art, community and social practice. His clients include nonprofits, cultural institutions and global brand including Art for Justice Fund, the Ford Foundation, the World Peace Foundation, the National Memorial for the Underground Railroad, Nike and Google. His work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Wallpaper, Design Miami, Monocle and The Architect’s Newspaper. Influenced by his Liberian heritage and passion for counter-culture, he presents keynotes globally on design as an invitation for communities to reclaim their futures. Nu will also be speaking at DesignThinkers Vancouver.

10:45 - 11:45 AM | Concurrent Session 1

Option A (Presentations): Care, Advocacy and Community

Visual Communication & Advocacy, presented by Meghan Saas, Tulane University School of Architecture and Built Environment, Design
How can graphic design support community and civic engagement? This is the question students are challenged to explore in the Tulane course Visual Communication & Advocacy, as they take skills from the classroom and put them to use in service to a local non-profit organization. Over the last three years, students have tackled projects ranging from rebranding to game design, meeting real-life needs for organizations serving the New Orleans community. See examples of community partnerships, projects completed and the planning involved in facilitating meaningful service learning for design students in this course.

About Meghan Saas
Meghan is a Professor of Practice and the Associate Director of the Design program at Tulane University School of Architecture and Built Environment. Meghan holds a BA in Painting & Drawing from Providence College and an MFA in Graphic Design from Louisiana State University. Her practice and research areas include typography and book arts—most often focusing on the topic of reproductive justice. Meghan believes that graphic design is a powerful tool not just for communication, but also for education and empowerment.

Care and Pacing in UX/UI Pedagogy, presented by Angela Henderson, NSCAD University
Angela examines how a studio-based practice—spanning drawing and installation—can inform UI/UX pedagogy. Studio-based approaches make space for uncertainty, perception, and embodied knowledge as sustained conditions for how design is learned and practiced.
By integrating methods developed through studio work into the classroom, students work with complexity while remaining attentive to real-world conditions and lived experience. Through teaching and research examples, including a Difficult History Database, I show how students move beyond personas and datasets by engaging more directly with the situations they are designing within. The talk frames UX/UI as a practice shaped by attention, care, and close observation, and considers the distinct possibilities that emerge when design education is grounded in an art school context.

About Angela Henderson
Angela is a design educator, artist and researcher based in Halifax. Her interdisciplinary practice spans drawing, spatial design and pedagogy, examining how attention, perception and material processes shape the ways we engage complex, real-world conditions. She teaches in the Design Department at NSCAD University, where she integrates studio-based approaches into design education, emphasizing observation, material inquiry and situated learning. Her teaching invites students to work with complexity while remaining attentive to lived experience. Her research has been supported through SSHRC-funded projects and collaborative partnerships. Alongside this work, her studio practice engages botanical drawing, installation and counter-archival approaches to reconsider how knowledge is produced, ordered and sustained.

Fostering Psychologically Safe Spaces in a Tumultuous World, presented by Diana Varma RGD, Toronto Metropolitan University
In a world that feels increasingly tumultuous, how can educators intentionally create psychologically safe classrooms? Design educator Diana  centres this question in her teaching, particularly in DG 8005: Interpersonal Communication. After six years and hundreds of students, she shares how prioritizing vulnerability and trust from week one transforms the learning environment. This session explores the metaphors, frameworks, and in-class strategies she uses to build psychological safety in practice, along with a key assignment that helps students see one another as full human beings. Attendees will gain practical insights into the who, what, where, why, when, and how of cultivating trust—creating classrooms where students can, both literally and metaphorically, exhale as they walk through the door.

About Diana Varma RGD
Diana works as a design educator at Toronto Metropolitan University by day and a podcaster by night; getting creative with creatives about all things creative. She is a curious human who dabbles in a variety of printing technologies and she currently holds the position VP Education on the Board of Directors for the RGD. She is the author of Brave Creative Human: Embrace Failure, Reframe Imposter Syndrome, and Be Unapologetically You. Diana can be found at www.talkpaperscissors.info.

Option B (Presentations): Platforms, Voice and Expanding Reach

Learning to Write as Designers, presented by Leah Burns, Fatemeh Pourseyed & Mia Portelance, Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD)
This presentation frames writing as a dynamic, developmental journey shaped by students’ evolving experiences across studio, research, and reflective contexts. Based on focus groups and interviews with students and faculty, the research highlights how writing mediates between making and thinking, intuition and articulation, and personal voice and disciplinary expectations, while also raising new questions about authorship, process, and the role of AI-assisted writing. Key themes include students’ shifting relationships with writing, moments of alignment and tension within design practice, and how faculty support writing development. The presentation also considers implications for pedagogy and Writing Centre support in an AI-augmented landscape, positioning writing as a relational, process-based practice central to design learning and identity formation.

About Fatemeh Pourseyed, Leah Burns & Mia Portelance
Fatemeh is a transdisciplinary designer and researcher living with a Bachelor’s in Communication Design from ECUAD. Her practice focuses on ecology, working with more-than-human systems while also supporting local businesses. As a former writing tutor, her research is rooted in accessible pedagogy, exploring ways to better support students and deepen connections between community, learning, and the environment. Mia is a design researcher and creative technologist with a Masters of Interaction Design (2026). Her practice involves 3D design, game design, immersive spaces and VR. Topics she researches include gaming, cyberfeminism, techno-orientalism, cyber-ethnography and the impact of generative AI on art and design education. Mia revolves her work around amplifying the voices of creative minorities and strives to pave the way for future generations through nonconformity and innovation. Leah is an Assistant Professor of Writing & Research at ECUAD. Leah's doctorate at the University of Toronto, focused on equity in postsecondary art and design-based research and learning. Over the past 20 years, Leah has worked extensively supporting arts-based research and design projects focused on health care, social services, arts and culture and environmental education in Canada and internationally. Leah leads research on improving equity and well-being in writing support for art and design students.

Reconnecting: Successes and challenges in graphic design student community building, presented by Sean Schumacher, Portland State University
For community-oriented fields like art and design, the shift to remote learning during the pandemic presented remarkable challenges. Just as arts faculty had to pivot often physical, craft-intensive classes to online formats without a clear template, student community-building initiatives—ranging from student-led social events to portfolio shows to public events—were also forced to reinvent themselves. Reflecting on the difficult lessons learned, this presentation discusses one program’s efforts to ensure design students remained connected through lockdown, as well as the lingering challenges involved in bringing student community activities, both new and old, back to a changed campus.

About Sean Schumacher
Sean is a designer, podcaster and educator serving as an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University. Their research primarily explores graphic design process and practices and graphic design’s relationship with publics both within and beyond the field through the lens of emerging media. Since 2021, they have hosted Did I Do That?, an oral history project masquerading as a comedy podcast that explores the impact mistakes have on designers’ creative practices over their careers. 

Reimagining Design Education Through Transatlantic Urban Inquiry, presented by Asma Mehan, Texas Tech University
This presentation explores how transatlantic urban inquiry, specifically in Houston and Amsterdam, can serve as a pedagogical field for reimagining design education. Centered on an interdisciplinary studio framework, the research examines how situated urban conditions, socio-ecological challenges, and infrastructural complexities become catalysts for design thinking and reflective practice. By juxtaposing two distinct urban contexts, one defined by rapid growth and climate vulnerability and the other by historical spatial form and adaptive resilience, the work highlights how students engage with lived environments to generate critical insights on community, ecology, and design agency. Through a combination of fieldwork, collaborative mapping, and reflective design research, the studio cultivates a deep understanding of how context informs both process and product in design education. The presentation will share key outcomes, methodological lessons, and implications for integrating urban inquiry into curricula that aim to prepare future designers for complex global challenges.

About Asma Mehan
Dr. Asma is an assistant professor of architecture at Texas Tech University, where she leads research at the intersections of design education, urbanism and socio-ecological justice. Her work critically examines how spatial practices, pedagogy and community engagement can foster equitable and regenerative urban futures. 

12:45 - 1:45 PM | Concurrent Session 2

Option A (Presentations): Play, Improvisation and Agency

The Serious Work of Play, presented by Natalia Delgado Avila
Details to be announced soon.

No Right Solutions: Teaching Design for Complexity through Student Agency, presented by Karin Schmidlin, University of British Columbia (UBC)
In project-based design education, we frequently emphasize student agency, yet instructors often inadvertently structure courses in ways that restrict it. This presentation shares insights from a design simulation embedded in a design course where messiness was not minimized but deliberately welcomed. Instead of following a project brief, students spent were immersed in a dynamic, real-world challenge characterized by incomplete information, conflicting stakeholder input and the absence of a single correct solution. The instructor's role evolved from that of an expert and evaluator to a designer of conditions and an occasional co-navigator. This model represents design education amid experimentation. Attendees will depart with practical strategies for crafting simulations and enhancing student agency without compromising rigour.

About Karin Schmidlin
Karin is a passionate educator with over 19 years of experience teaching UX Design. With a Master of Digital Media from the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver and teaches design-focused courses at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and UBC’s School of Information, serving both the graduate Library program and the undergraduate Minor in Informatics. Karin is pursuing her doctoral degree with a research focus on fostering student agency within complex design simulations. Her work explores how immersive, collaborative learning environments can empower students to take ownership of their learning.

(dis/re)connecting: Improvisational Collective Paradigms, presented by Isabel Bo-Linn, Portland State University
The long-declared purpose of design education is to prepare student designers for industry. Commonly, this is accomplished through polished briefs, fictional clients and neatly packaged, user-friendly design processes – double diamond, design thinking, human-centred design, etc. This normative design education tends to commodify knowledge sharing, prioritize the individual and emphasizes designing-of over designing-for. This presentation illuminates how improvisation can serve as a key driver for design educators to embrace adaptive collective design practices while reframing design education as a communal entity and a conduit for open-sourced knowledge exchanges.

About Isabel Bo-Linn
Isabel is a designer, educator and researcher. She received a BFA from Loyola Marymount University and a Master in Graphic Design (MGD) from North Carolina State University. Her current research focuses on innovative design education curriculum, specifically examining how creative technologies impact design education and creative processes. She is the co-author of a forthcoming book, AI for Designers: Supporting Creativity in Graphic Design Education.

Option B (Workshop): Top 10 High Value Classroom Activities Learned Through Teaching 100 Courses

Presented by Diana Varma RGD, Toronto Metropolitan University
From an icebreaker that gets even the most reluctant students to participate to a useful way to learn students’ names to a technique used to keep students off their phones (as well as seven other actionable ideas!), this workshop allows participants to experience the 10 most impactful ways Diana has found to engage with students, after having taught 100+ courses. Themes of play, joy, humanity, empathy, access and decolonization are both overly and covertly integrated into these 10 high-value classroom activities that participants will experience first-hand, experiencing them as students in the session.

About Diana Varma RGD
Diana works as a design educator at Toronto Metropolitan University by day and a podcaster by night; getting creative with creatives about all things creative. She is a curious human who dabbles in a variety of printing technologies and she currently holds the position VP Education on the Board of Directors for the RGD. She is the author of Brave Creative Human: Embrace Failure, Reframe Imposter Syndrome, and Be Unapologetically You. Diana can be found at www.talkpaperscissors.info.

1:55 - 2:55 PM | Concurrent Session 3

Option A (Presentations): Culture, Place and Teaching through Narrative

The Classroom as a Border Crossing: Teaching Information Design Through Cultural Translation, presented by Rowaz Abo Mazid, Mount Royal University 
This presentation reframes the classroom as a cultural “field trip,” where students move beyond their own perspectives to engage with unfamiliar contexts. Through a series of information design assignments, students select an existing artifact, such as an infographic, advertisement or magazine cover and analyze the cultural assumptions embedded within it. They then redesign it for a different cultural audience. Rather than focusing only on visual changes, the project pushes students to think about empathy, accessibility and ethics. It asks them to question their assumptions and navigate the challenges of adapting information across cultures without oversimplifying or appropriating. Rowaz shares student outcomes, key challenges and practical strategies for guiding these discussions in the classroom. It offers a flexible assignment model that encourages curiosity, critical thinking and more responsible design in a global context.

About Rowaz Abo Mazid
Rowaz is a design educator and practitioner whose teaching and practice span information design, interior design, architecture, graphic design and web design. Rather than treating these as discrete disciplines, her work proceeds from the position that visual, spatial and communicative practices are deeply interconnected and their intersections are precisely where the most generative questions arise. She holds academic appointments at Mount Royal University and the University of Calgary and is currently pursuing a PhD in Art and Design. Her doctoral research draws on spatial analysis, material culture and visual storytelling to examine how designed environments and information systems function as instruments of cultural translation and meaning making. This interdisciplinary orientation structures her pedagogy as much as her practice. 

Aha loa me Makawalu: Place as Teacher, Story as Method in Design Education, presented by Herman Pi’ikea Clark, OCAD University, Faculty of Design
Details to be announced soon.

Prototyping Canadian Design Culture, presented by Dr. Bonne Zabolotney, Emily Carr University of Art and Design (ECUAD)
This presentation introduces ways of rethinking a multi-disciplinary, practice-based design history of Canadian Design. Her research focuses on the the everyday design that built the cultural landscape of Canada. Importantly, it also highlights Canada's little-known "Good Design Movement" which occurred directly after WWII and focused on the benefits of well-designed everyday design products and experiences. As a trained communication designer, she uses mapping and other information design techniques to sort through resources. This practice-based approach to building historical narratives is just one way of bridging contemporary practice to historic precedent.  In this presentation, she shares the results of her research, highlighting the need for Canada to document and index their design works in ways that offer a plurality of perspectives and values, and to develop ways to address a decolonizing approach to our design narratives.

About Dr. Bonne Zabolotney
Dr. Bonne is a professor of Communication Design and Design Studies at ECUAD. Her academic training includes visual communication (BDes), liberal arts (MA) and practice-based design research (PhD). As a professor, she teaches histories and theories of design, design research methods and communication design practices. Her current research focuses on Canadian design culture — particularly anonymous and unacknowledged works— and the political economy of design. She is a general editor of Bloomsbury Publishing’s (London, UK) online design library, as well as an occasional research consultant and coach of organizational design.

Option B (Workshop): Collaborative Program Development: Using Figma to navigate uncertainty in design education

Presented by Darinka Aguirre, BCIT
Details to be announced soon.

3:05 - 4:05 PM | Concurrent Session 4

Option A (Presentations): Emerging Tools and the Evolving Designer

Leveraging AI to Support Intercultural Critique in Virtual Global Art and Design Education, presented by Amrita D. Haughn and Sydney Craig, Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design
Over the past four years, two professors in Fine Arts and Visual Communication Design have incorporated collaborative Virtual Global Learning Exchange projects into their courses to mirror real-world professional practices. Their aim is to strengthen students’ intercultural communication skills, especially in giving and receiving critique. In art and design education, critique plays a central role in helping students build shared understanding, expand discipline-specific language and refine their judgment, turning ideas into polished outcomes. These experiences reflect the global and digitally connected nature of contemporary creative industries, where collaboration often spans cultures and distances. However, cultural differences in communication styles can complicate feedback exchanges. To address this, the professors guide students in cross-cultural teamwork and critical analysis while also introducing AI tools to help generate culturally responsive evaluation rubrics. Their work examines how structured critique environments and AI integration can support meaningful intercultural learning and improve feedback practices in diverse, virtual classroom settings.

About Amrita D. Haughn and Sydney Craig
Amrita is a designer, researcher and educator who believes design is a social language waiting to be seen. At Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design, she teaches Visual Communication Design, guiding students to use visuals as tools for dialogue and discovery. Holding a BFA from Kent State University and MFA from Indiana University in Visual Communication Design and as PhD candidate in American Studies, she explores U.S. identity, nationalism and patriotism; her people-centred practice tackles social and cultural questions, turning visuals into tools for dialogue and understanding. Amrita’s work moves between classrooms, communities and research spaces, always looking for the stories design can tell through conversations that matter. Sydney treats the classroom as an artistic installation where students are mediums of imagination and innovation. She serves as Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Foundation Studies Program and First-year Experience at Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design. With an MFA in Printmaking, she weaves her teaching and creative research by examining process as practice as she develops contemporary curricula for first-year students, emphasizing global mindsets and international collaboration through art and design projects. 

The Scroll Is the Page Now: Teaching typography in feed-first environments, presented by Jan Ballard, Texas Christian University (TCU)
Design education now extends into fast-moving digital spaces where meaning forms in real time. This presentation explores social media as a context for teaching messaging and branding, emphasizing clarity, voice and audience awareness. A featured assignment challenges students to communicate within small screens, rapid scrolling and limited attention. In this setting, decisions around tone, narrative and identity become both strategic and culturally responsive. Structured around iteration, critique and live publishing, the project reflects contemporary workflows while encouraging experimentation and adaptability. Attendees will leave with a flexible assignment model, approaches for incorporating public-facing critique and a broader perspective on teaching branding and messaging in evolving digital environments.

About Jan Ballard
Jan is a senior graphic design educator at TCU where she has taught since 1986, after earning her BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her work centres on mentorship, community engagement and preparing emerging designers for professional practice. Jan's contributions reflect a sustained commitment to advancing design education through collaboration, service and professional impact.

UX Now: Tactile innovation in a digital world, presented by Thomas Girard, University of Reading
In an age dominated by high-speed digital tools, UX Now offers a deliberate return to tactile, analog methods in UX training. Spanning five weeks, this immersive program cultivates foundational UX skills through accessible, iterative processes that emphasize empathy, storytelling and audience-centred design. Beginning with idea generation through affinity diagramming and progressing through wireframing, paper prototyping, user testing and high-fidelity deliverables, participants explore both divergent and convergent thinking. Each session is structured into four parts: a collaborative “Head Dump” for cross-pollination of ideas, a topic-focused presentation, guided in-class workshop time and rigorous peer critique. Core tools include sticky notes, index cards, pens, Figma, Adobe CC and Google Slides—used not to replace, but to extend, the power of analog ideation.

About Thomas Girard
Thomas is a Typographic Careers Consultant in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading where he advises on the careers syllabus for its BA Graphic Communication course. Duties involve both strategic thinking about the future of design careers and the running of lectures and workshops for students across all three years of the course. Thomas is an Oxford-educated design thought leader recognized globally for advancing innovation at the intersection of creativity, education and technology. He is the host of UNIQUEWAYS, a global podcast with over 250 guests—including Don Norman, Debbie Millman and John Maeda exploring the creative journeys of the world’s most influential thinkers. 

Option B (Workshop): Design is a Contact Sport: Combating Userless UX

Presented by Glen Hougan, NSCAD University
UX design education faces a growing problem, which is the rise of Useless UX also known as Synthetic User Experience (SUX). As students increasingly leverage AI to generate UX personas, data and research outcomes, the messy, essential work of direct human interaction is being replaced by AI mimicry. To reverse this trend, educators must re-centre UX design on genuine human connection. How can we champion meaningful design experiences that prioritize real people over synthetic substitutes? Through a series of exercises involving group reflections, strategy sharing and group design challenges, this workshop examines the rise of Userless UX with the aim of having educators shift the focus from designing digital interfaces to designing human experiences as the primary output of UX design.

About Glen Hougan
Glen is a service/experience designer and Associate Professor in Design at NSCAD University, specializing in healthcare and design for aging populations. As an advocate for design thinking and UX, his research focuses on designing for dignity. He serves as the Principal of Wellspan Research and Design and an Adjunct Professor of Engineering at Dalhousie University. He was named the Sun Life Financial Chair in Design in Health and Aging and received a Research Fellowship at the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation.

4:15 - 5:10 PM | Closing Keynote

Radical Publishing & Riso Lab, presented by Elaine Lopez

This session presents Radical Publishing & Riso Lab, a studio course that treats New York City as an active site of inquiry rather than a backdrop. Centred on Risograph printing as the means of production, the course approaches publishing as a collective and political practice informed by circulation, labour and access. Students move between the classroom and spaces such as Interference Archive, Secret Riso Club, Lucky Risograph and the Parsons School of Design university archives, using these visits to inform the content and form of radical posters, zines, GIFs and collaborative publications. Field trips are not enrichment; they are the structure of the course. Encounters with archives, working studios and practitioners generate research questions, writing prompts, production constraints and distribution strategies. In this presentation, Elaine share a framework for treating the city as an extended classroom, practical models for archive-based making exercises and approaches to teaching print production as critical inquiry and shared authorship. Mobility—both geographic and conceptual—becomes a method for reshaping how design knowledge is produced and circulated.

About Elaine Lopez

Elaine is a Cuban-American designer, researcher and educator whose work explores the intersections of cultural identity, print culture and socially engaged design. She is an Assistant Professor of Communication Design at Parsons School of Design at The New School, where she teaches Thesis, Riso printing and typography. Across her research, teaching and professional practice, Elaine approaches design as a relational act—one that can foster dialogue, cultivate care and challenge dominant narratives.