Relational Design for Living and Learning featured at Design Forge 2025!
Leaders in design and higher education met at Elon University’s Center for Design Thinking on March 27-28 for the annual Design Forge focusing on relational learning and living. This year the conference welcomed 35 guests in-person and over 50 virtual participants from across the globe to share stories and research-backed strategies for relational and joyful learning and living.
Inspired by last year’s conference, the Forge opened with a keynote talk from Eugene Korsunskiy, associate professor of engineering and co-director of the Design Initiative at Dartmouth College. Korsunskiy guided participants through “Together by Design: Joy, Community, & Forging Better Worlds” with activities from the “Little Book of Joy.”
The Forge also featured a number of Elon University faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Professor Evan Small worked with his students to design opportunities for conference guests to explore relational design opportunities in nature. Professor Tim Peeples took participants through mapping mentoring constellations, Professor Elena Kennedy helped participants think through how they might redesign their relationship to time, and Elon counselor Bonny Buckley led a session on how to bring joy through “Music, Making, & More.” In addition, Alumni Tyson Glover and Mackenzie Hahn returned to Elon as virtual cohosts of the Forge.
DiMitri Higginbotham, assistant professor and Director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Integrated Design, had participants explore practices to create relational and transformational learning environments. As a music educator, he has brought design thinking into the classroom to enhance his students’ learning and think about the world in different ways.
“You give kids the power to imagine — learn from people, empathize, and create — instead of just making boring school projects, or making caterpillars out of egg cartons,” Higginbotham said. “How can you design a plate for a caterpillar to help them so they love that? It’s a new way of approaching learning that I think should be in every school.”
The Center’s community-engaged workshop brought Diya Abdo back to campus. Abdo is the Lincoln Financial Professor of English at Guilford College, author of “American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience,” and Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR) founder. Abdo returned to Elon University to facilitate a powerful discussion on actionable change through cross-cultural dialogue among students, organizers and community members. Participants were asked to reflect on their lives and the communities they live in now.
Elon’s Center for Design Thinking Research Lead Joshua Franklin ’25 attended his fourth and final Design Forge as an Elon student. In comparison to other years, this year he presented with student director Adam Kanowitz on the work of the Center over the past five years. Using data collected from over 900 Center workshops and over 20,000 responses, the session highlighted the tools and strategies the Center has designed and facilitated to support student learning.
“Now it’s such a different conference. The first time we were sitting in there in the middle of the room with all the faculty and people that came to present,” Franklin said. “This year, I haven’t had a chance to sit. It’s wonderful. It’s amazing. I love it. Now I get to present. This is the goal now, especially as a research lead. This is what we’ve been working towards for the past three years.”
Closing keynote speakers and authors of “Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human” Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, and Kriti Sharma shared compelling stories and transformative strategies drawn from their lifework, followed by an engaging Q&A session open to both virtual and in-person attendees.
“One cannot be on this planet right now and not feel grief,” Osterweil said. “I was born in a land where there is war right now. In order to feel joy, you need to feel grief. Do not try to change the world. Make new worlds. Design new worlds.”
More information about the conference, including recordings from each session, can be found on the Elon by Design website under Design Forge 2025.