The Pandemic and This Issue of Design Education

When we first initiated a call for this issue on design education, never could we have imagined or foreseen what lay ahead. Since late 2019, Hong Kong has gone through an enormously difficult time. First, spikes of social unrest, rapidly followed by COVID-19. Half of the first semester of the 2019 – 2020 academic year, as skirmishes closed in on The Hong Kong Polytechnic University campus, all courses had to move over to available and often misunderstood online platforms. As the situation finally subsided, the virus emerged, impacting the commencement of the second semester, and the overall delivery modes of a structured curriculum for an entire year. Both faculty and students of the School of Design lived and worked in high hopes to return to faceto- face teaching sooner, rather than later. In time, hope conceded to a stark reality that online, the virtual and the digital models of education, have moved into focus as the main and primary modes of education. Long gone are the days of the digital as a mere supplemental or peripheral possibility. The digital reality presented other challenges to design education: ensuring credible and authentic outcomes for each of the design disciplines within a non-studio setting, the expression of ideas, or demonstrating principles across and through digital platforms with the additional burdens of a digital generation that instantaneously become camera shy. Or, in the extreme the mistrust shown by students that reviewers may not understand the design work without a physical presence. Moving one year forward, the growing pains of digital pedagogies has caused an instantaneous maturing of educators, those being educated, and of what is said, shown and discussed. Somehow, the global body of design environments have collectively responded to these and more local challenges, yet again transforming the specifics of digital pedagogies across unexplored territories. The following series of images attest to the resilience of digital pedagogies and design institutions. May this stand as a testament to rapid responses, individuals who took the reins, and how educators shape the future of design, design-research and ultimately how design is carried forward across generations.

Digital pedagogies and biotechnical realities: Education and life after the COVID-19 pandemic

What would have taken years to change in the world we knew, took just a few months during a global pandemic. Millions of teachers, therapists, and other practitioners around the world whose work requires direct contact with people, dived into every synchronous and asynchronous platform they could find. They had to in order to continue their work with students or clients, to maintain connections, to empower people during the crisis, to ensure that nobody felt alone, to protect and strengthen life, and to resist a vicious invisible threat. All these practitioners struggled to ensure physical distancing did not result in social or emotional distancing, and managed to do so through web technologies and digital media. The social pattern of life, the very pattern that allowed coronavirus to threaten humanity, is the same pattern helped maintain life during lockdown by taking advantage of digital media.