For the first time in the history of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design, three AICAD institutions will collaborate through active partnerships of faculty, staff, students, and campuses to host the 2020 AICAD Symposium in Philadelphia. Located within blocks of each other in Philadelphia, a dynamic contemporary cultural center with richly diverse historical sites, Moore College of Art & Design (MCAD), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), and University of the Arts (UArts) have planned a lively and prescient annual conference with collateral and coordinated opportunities to visit and explore a remarkable city. The three AICAD host institutions and their conference planning teams seek proposals for presentations, panels, workshops, thinking conversations, performances, and other traditional and new forms for communication and delivery at the 2020 AICAD Symposium to be held in Philadelphia, November 5 – 7.
The topic of the symposium is “the future” – and what it means or looks like to be future-thinking as faculty, artists, designers, and scholars who seek to educate, animate or prompt students (as well as our own thinking) for futures of accelerating and often unpredictable change. What does it mean to be future-minded? In addition to retrospection, how do we engage in “prospection?”
Introduced by Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson (2007), prospection suggests the development of different representations of futures. Both a psychological and cognitive phenomenon, prospection includes the imagination of future scenarios (episodic foresight), planning, response and emotion (affective forecasting), and inherent speculation. Areas of research include human learning, conceptual and mental time travel, deliberate practice, concepts of creativity, flexible decision-making, and motivation.
All teachers, artists, designers, and scholars operate in different temporal frames. (Why) we can’t stop thinking about the future. Is this an ambiguous concept or bold assertion, a philosophical query or call to action? Why we can’t stop thinking about the future because . . . Because educators seek to (and arguably must) prepare students for the future or futures -- the known and unknowns. Are creative people predisposed to think more frequently about the future – or to engage in these questions through different intellectual dispositions, perspectives, or vantage points?
It is often reported that 65% of primary school children today will work as adults in jobs (and perhaps in ways) that don’t yet exist. Global and ubiquitous challenges include the changing scope of technology, privacy, and surveillance capitalism; global warming and severe environmental change; global economic (in)justice and food and climate refugees; and the nature of work, and increasing care and green economies. Paradoxically, schools can both be agents or harbingers -- recalcitrants or obstructions – of change.