Over the years, the standard Indian school curriculum has increasingly marginalised arts, crafts, and design education. This has led to the neglect of interdisciplinary approaches and creative problem-solving skills, which are essential not only in professional fields but also in everyday life. The influence of Western science and technology on design education, along with the shift from local to global perspectives, has also impacted the preservation of indigenous handcrafts, cultural diversity, traditional knowledge systems, identities, and natural resources in craft-rich communities.

The inaccessibility of global cultural heritage limits its potential to shape identities and inform design, a challenge compounded by historical power imbalances in knowledge production. This paper proposes a design education framework integrating Indigenous knowledge systems, critical theory, and human-centred design. It addresses digital cultural heritage preservation in a postcolonial context using a South African case study. Drawing on a Title Sequence Design Module at a South African university in a Digital Design department, we developed a project collaboration with a South African art museum that explores motion-based digital narratives to democratise access to heritage, preserve culture and traditions, disrupt colonial legacies, and cultivate ethical designers.

This paper examines the relative paucity of curriculum offerings in design history and design education programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in South Africa. The neglect of design history suggests a wholesale under-appreciation of the role of history and design development in industrial and economic production within the country in recent decades, as well as a disconnect between the relevant policy makers and the tertiary institutions in the country. The inexplicable lack of realisation of and response by business, state and society to the closure of the National Design Institute of South Africa in the early 2020s is an example of this disjunction.

This paper examines how sustainability and future-focused design can be effectively integrated into design education through a case study of a third-year Industrial Design project in South Africa. As part of an international design competition, students were challenged to critically engage with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by identifying and addressing actionable problems. Working in teams, they developed technically refined product solutions within a computer-aided design (CAD) environment, applying human-centred and sustainability-driven design principles. The project outcome analysed in this study tackled organic waste management in lower-income urban areas under the competition theme of “sustainable habitat/city infrastructure”.

In many design education programmes, especially within multi-site higher education institutions, assessment development is often centralised and standardised to ensure quality, consistency and equitable delivery across campuses. While this approach maintains institutional coherence, it can also constrain lecturers’ freedom to adapt assessments in response to emerging technologies such as AI-driven tools, local industry demands and evolving design challenges.

Design education within the Higher Education sector must recognise its critical role in preparing students to design solutions for the challenges of the future. This paper explores the theoretical and conceptual similarities and differences between design and futures thinking that can be integrated for more socially and economically impactful design practice that shapes the future. The role of future-focused design can also play a significant role in the teaching of disciplines and subjects outside of the design field.

In 2006, author Howard Gardner published a book titled Five Minds for the Future. The book considers how global trends in contemporary society, such as the increasing power of and reliance on technology, will affect the future of education and the development of human intelligence. The book goes on to outline a theoretical model of five different types of intelligences and the pertinent role each will play in the future. While the book was written and published nearly two decades ago, many of Gardner’s trends, forecasts, and analyses have proven useful over the progression of time, and continue to increase in global influence.

This paper reflects on multidisciplinary, collaborative engagement projects conducted over the past five years, initiated in 2021 during the global COVID-19 lockdowns. These projects – primarily facilitated between our University’s School of Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) and Engagement Office – saw collaborations between Graphic Design students, Photography students, faculty members, Engagement Office staff, and community partners. These collaborative engagement projects provided unique challenges and opportunities, allowing for the emergence of meaningful lessons in response to the question “how are we designing for engagement through collaborative, dialogical, or multidisciplinary approaches to design education, practice, and community building?”

The MakersLab is a new creative space within a leading South African design education institution. The space encourages creative intersections to bridge the 4IR knowledge gap with sustainable development goals, 4IR and explorative making. Over the past year, the development and integration of the MakersLab have been integral in establishing educator/student relationships. The development of the MakersLab is seen as an ‘incubator’ for change whilst navigating current socio-economic and gender development gaps. Here, the space aims to foster user needs, develop new ways of thinking, and engage with the community. The fast development of technology means that educators learn from students as much as students learn from educators.

African philosophies of Ubuntu prioritise humanising the community of learning. Contextualising Ubuntu within the emerging Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) creates a tension between algorithms and the craft of design scholarship. The effect of the 5IR, while being more human-centred, is also unpredictable in terms of how technology replaces or automates human activity. This has led students to use technology tools to shortcut or circumvent activities that result in deep or transformative learning. Within the context of design education, this threatens the aptitudes and dispositions needed for engaging with the design process with the goal of establishing critical and creative authorship.

The urgent need for pedagogical change, made possible by Digital Transformation (DT), is indisputable in design education (DE). This study considers the relationship between the evolution of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) and the need for modernised pedagogy suitable for learning DE online, particularly by African students. The focus of the investigation is on the methods used in delivering DE curricula in relation to these technological platforms. This is carried out using a qualitative research approach with a phenomenological analysis framework. A conceptual model is constructed to explain the phenomena of interest. The research process reflects a constructivist epistemological paradigm based on the direct experiences and perspectives of the participants.

Klaus Schwab defines the word "revolution" to convey the "abrupt" and "radical" change, which brought about the first, second, third and fourth industrial revolutions. Schwab explains that the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) will transform the way humans communicate, socially connect, function day to day and operate their jobs. The 4IR is not only about technology; its fundamental difference is due to these technologies combining: as a result, the physical, digital and biological spheres overlap.

As a socio-technical field, design has always been intertwined with the industrial revolutions. During the continuous growth of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) in South Africa, it is prevalent for design education to reevaluate what is taught to young designers.

This study aimed to identify the measures taken by a large international advertising company to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, and how these measures could be applied to design education. We interviewed a senior business partner of the company and determined the measures they took and their business variables affected by the pandemic. The results show how the pandemic affected interaction between design professionals; how they develop and present their creative solutions and how they brainstorm, collaborate, and remain inspired. The company will not be returning to their previous way of operating, and neither do they see the need to do so.

As we enter the era of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) faced with potential ethical and security risks, ensuring sustainable and inclusive innovation within the design industries will be essential. However, this proves unlikely when the design industry itself has inherent biases and inequalities.

Emerging IR 4.0 systems have the capacity both negatively and positively to disrupt. While currently much of the design in this regard has for practical reasons focused on technical systems, there is an urgent need to ensure that these systems due to their physical fabrication, pervasive deployment, and autonomous capabilities, are integrated into our human world in a manner that enhances the human condition and ensure planetary sustainment. Supporting this urgent need, this paper suggests that human-centred design (HCD) can make a substantial contribution, albeit with a recasting of its traditional design role.

The industrial revolution, a steady process of change that started in the eighteenth century, has been characterised as presenting different phases. The fourth phase (4IR), which signals an unprecedented convergence of physical, digital and biological spheres into technological forces, is transforming jobs faster than employees can adapt, and setting the base for a different kind of skill. Hence, everyone, including arts and design educators, are asking similar questions about its potential challenges and opportunities in their fields, particularly in the African universities of technology that place emphasis on career-directed courses.

Critical design has been philosophically positioned as that which opposes the affirmative role of design as the status quo, offering itself as social critique located in the formalised spaces of museums and galleries. This paper contests that reasoning by firstly showing that in the contemporary sphere, criticality in design now resides in a more socially aware and humanistically engaged space. Design propositions can be expressed from the perspective of modes of enquiry that ask both What if? and How else? questions in the vein of Malpass and Slotnick. These then propose alternative ways of considering design not as a way of seeking answers but as a way of asking questions.

Students across the globe are demanding a change in education.  In South Africa, the call is for ‘decolonisation’ of higher education.  Initially, the call was for free higher education, but students then demanded a significant overhaul of higher education; from the removal of symbols celebrating white supremacy, to a change in the selection criteria and policies to promote applicants on more indicators than academic aptitude alone.

This paper reports on the use of object biography writing as a method for Communication Design students to construct knowledge in the Design Studies classroom. Students used a guideline constructed around the stages of the birth, life and death of an object to write an object biography on a mass-manufactured object of their own choice with a focus on how the object is used by individuals to construct and express gender identity.