Wagdy Sawahel  
December 2019

“African universities have not caught up on tackling fake news, either as research or teaching,” said Idayat Hassan, director of the Centre for Democracy and Development, a Nigeria-based policy advocacy and research organisation.

“Sometimes, students spend hours online but are not able to discern a phony URL that is pushing a contentious issue,” she told University World News.

"We need to empower our students with both technological and social skills," said Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg at the recent USAf-hosted National Higher Education Conference.

The author(s) has spent dozens, perhaps hundreds of hours doing research and writing this paper. They have put their faith in the reviewing system – that’s you – and there is probably a lot riding on whether it gets published.

DEFSA was invited to send an observer to the The Design Declaration Pre-Summit in Saint-Etienne, in preparation for next Design Declaration Summits scheduled for 2020/21 and 2023/24.

The two days were dedicated to three key projects proposed in the Montréal Design Declaration:

The Fourteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field. For design practitioners, a central paradox of our times is the increasing specialization, on the one hand, but on the other, the need for more broad-ranging and holistic integration of design tasks, working between and across design disciplines. Design is becoming an ever-more social, indeed sociable, process.

"Educating Citizen Designers in South Africa is the first book of its kind to appear in post-apartheid South Africa and it is therefore both overdue and extremely welcome. The book aims at sharing critical citizenship design teaching and learning pedagogies by including contributions from a range of design educators, and one student, who work in different design disciplines, such as architecture, graphic and product design.

DEFSA held a successful abstract writing workshop on the 14 th of September aimed at encouraging members to write abstracts for the DEFSA 2019 conference. The workshop was hosted by Inscape Cape Town while simulcasts were run at Tshwane University of Technology and Nelson Mandela University. Over 40 design educators, facilitators and postgraduate students participated in the workshop.

A Nigerian waste management company is turning Nigeria’s discarded waste into stunning furniture and home décor.  Pearl Recycling is creatively solving one of Nigeria’s most pressing issues – waste management.

A few years ago, Olamide Ayeni-Babajide was on a trip to the United Arab Emirates. The social entrepreneur and founder of the Nigeria-based Pearl Recycling walked into a furniture store and was immediately drawn to a home décor piece in the form of a flower.

Professional Practice-based research was the topic of a recent workshop organized by the Design Education Forum of Southern Africa (DEFSA) on 8 June 2018.

Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education provides a contemporary volume that offers a scholarly perspective on tertiary level art and design education. Providing a theoretical lens to examine studio education, the authors suggest a student-centred model of curriculum that supports the development of creativity.

Let’s accept it, doing a PhD can be intellectually challenging, physically tiring and emotionally draining. Your attitude and motivations will have a huge influence on your success

Sioux McKenna, Professor and Higher Education Studies PhD Co-ordinator, Rhodes University suggest five things to think about if you’re considering a doctorate.

The SAMIP Innovation Challenge is for South African projects and organisations that are building news and information products that engage and inform local/underserved communities, by:

• searching for new ways to connect people with information,
• exploring new business models, distribution mechanisms and/or revenue generation opportunities, or
• creating platforms within existing news outlets for citizen reporting through mobile technology

The deadline for our initial funding cycle is midnight on October 31, 2017.

The following is an open letter from Professors Victor Margolin and Ezio Manzini urging all designers to act and respond to the crisis affecting democracy.

The letter invites designers to consider and discuss opportunities in their own practices for enhancing processes of democratization. To be transformative, social innovation has to consider the direction of the desired transformation.

This three part series by Pat Thomson, Professor of Education in the School of Education at The University of Nottingham in the UK makes interesting reading for Peer Reviewers. Please note that the opinions and reviewing style of the author may not represent DEFSA's peer review process.

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Academics are trying to rid South Africa’s universities of the procedures, values, norms, practices, thinking, beliefs and choices that mark anything non-European and not white as inferior. Emmanuel Mgqwashu, Professor of English Language Teaching and Literacy Development, Rhodes University discusses the issue.