Art & Design Education: FutureLab will be held at the West Bund Art Center in Shanghai from November 25th to December 1st, 2019. It aims at showcasing the cutting-edge trends of teaching and creation in the field of art and design, and revealing the multidimensional and open-ended relationship between teaching and learning.

FutureLab consists of three main sections, including exhibitions, on-site workshops and thematic forums, which will form an effective dialogue on the present and future of art and design education.

Initiated and operated by the West Bund Art and Design Fair team, FutureLab will invite leading art and design schools and academies from all over the world to present the latest achievements of their faculties and students. The venue of the West Bund Art Center New Hall is located in the West Bund Museum Mile, along with other important galleries, private art museums and art organizations.

Exhibitions

A platform for presentations and dialogues, the Exhibition section will offer a unique opportunity to see teachers and students’ most recent explorations and innovations in art and design and explore the frontiers of art and design’s concepts and practices.

Each participating school will have an independent booth to curate an exhibition, with works ranging from new media art, AI, and fashion design, to material studies and urban planning.

Workshops

A series of workshops led by different schools will turn the venue of FutureLab into classrooms, allowing participants to directly interact with professional tutors, and to learn more about the essence, concepts and ways of learning of art and design disciplines through hands-on participation. At the same time, encouraging participants to think creatively and to explore the world around them through creative practices is also one of the important purposes of the workshop.

Global Dean’s Talk: One Thing You Should Learn in Art School

The “Global Dean's Talk” is one of the opening events of  “Art & Design Education: FutureLab”.  Under the theme of “One Thing You Should Learn in Art Schools”, 10 deans from leading academies are invited to share their experiences and thoughts in the long-term practice of art education. This quintessential "one thing" could be a specific piece of knowledge, a set of skills, certain ideology or methodology, which will be of great significance to students in their future art or life journey. Meanwhile, those speeches will also inspire the vast number of arts educators, parents and students, as well as other art practitioners and researchers.

POIESIS & Precision: Non-trivial Relations Between Arts, Design and Sciences

Curated by Prof. Siegfried Zielinski, the esteemed German media theory scholar and Professor of Media Archaeology and Techno-Culture at the European Graduate School, the symposium will invite more than 10 well-established researchers and scholars in art and science worldwide to explore the experimental spirit and cutting-edge nature of science, and how it affects the theory and practice of art and design. Emphasis is placed on the importance of interdisciplinary research, and how innovative ideas in art and design can be stimulated and expanded.

The participating speakers have conducted longtime and in-depth research and practice in expansive areas, including new media theory, artificial intelligence technology, computer science, sound experiment, physics, philosophy and other disciplines. They will share their latest research directions and achievements during the symposium, and show the sparks between art and science in a multi-dimensional way through visual arts and performances.

The forum is co-organized by the School of Philosophy at Fudan University.