Design Forge is Elon’s annual convening of design thinking educators, practitioners and thought leaders. Each year, Design Forge addresses a topic of interest to higher education, strengthens collaboration in the design thinking community and searches for new opportunities for design thinking to enhance student learning.
Design Forge 2025: Relational Design
March 27th – March 28th, 2025 (in-person & virtual!)
Visit the 2025 Design Forge Conference Website
Relationality & Design Book Club
Preforge Event
Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human by Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, and Kriti Sharma.
Leading up to the author’s closing keynote at the Design Forge, this four-part series will offer participants a collaborative space to engage with these transformative ideas.
If you’re interested in attending, please click on the button below to look at the dates you can register for!
Like prior years, we will spend time together exploring the how-might-we question in an environment that is part design and part convening, launching new relationships and generating questions, resources, ideas, and frameworks that advance the value and impact of design thinking practices.
Interested in attending in person? Share your interest here!
Interested in attending virtually? Register here!
Design Forge 2025 – March 27-28, 2025
Forge 2025 is a hybrid convening, with limited in-person attendance and opportunities to engage virtually! Like in prior years, we will spend time together exploring the how-might-we question in an environment that is part design and part convening, launching new relationships and generating questions, resources, ideas, and frameworks that advance the value and impact of design thinking practices.
Previous Forges
- Design Forge 2024 | Design for Well-being
- Design Forge 2023 | How might we design with and across intergenerational communities?
- Design Forge 2022 | Assessing DT practices — How might we better understand, design for, & demonstrate the impact of design thinking pedagogies?
- Design Forge 2021 | Participatory placemaking practices — How might DT support participatory placemaking practices?
- Design Forge 2020 | Student well-being and wellness — How might university design thinking efforts enhance student well-being and wellness?
- Design Forge 2019 | Learn and teach service design — How might we create better ways for people to learn and teach design thinking and service design?
- Design Forge 2018 | DT project-based learning — How might we create ways to use design thinking projects as project-based learning? Feel free to learn more by reading the 2018