Design Assignments: Prompting, Probing, Prototyping (Valiz)
A call for contributions from Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe and Merle Ibach
This edited volume aims to make visible the often-invisible pedagogical work of crafting engaging design assignments and to create a shared toolkit for contemporary design education. It seeks to examine how design/ing can be taught as a practice of worlding through assignments that function as prompting, probing, and prototyping – inviting learners into the co-creation of worlds and the imagination of collaborative futures. Design Assignments: Prompting, Probing, Prototypingambitions to document and disseminate multimodal teaching approaches that integrate diverse forms of knowledge (academic, local, implicit, Indigenous, and embodied) and foster a care-full pedagogy that opens up new paths and possibilities for learning and designing across various design disciplines.
We invite you – educators, practitioners, scholars, researchers, and peers from a variety of fields in design (such as Graphic Design, Interaction Design, Transformation Design, Social Design, Game Design, Fashion Design, Scenographic Design, Product and Industrial Design, Architecture, Interior Architecture, Landscape Architecture) to share a design assignment you consider poetic, playful, thought-provoking, joyful, boundary-pushing, or else, that prompts, probes, prototypes, invites, immerses, imagines collaborative future worlds.
We are interested in applied and engaged approaches to teaching design. More specifically, we invite the submission of assignments that can be integrated into design education — as well as into social sciences and humanities disciplines that use multimodal formats for studying, documenting, analyzing, representing, and disseminating knowledge — and will address the following objectives:
How to implement design/ing as worlding through assignments that can be understood as Prompting, Probing, Prototyping – as invitation, immersion, and imagining of new paths and possibilities?
Teaching Design/ing as Co-creating Worlds
In contemporary design education, we conceptualize assignments as pedagogical tools to open up the co-creation of worlds and create a community of learners, who engage in thinking possible futures (objects, bodies, spaces) in intriguing and original ways.
As part of our work in teaching design/ing, much effort and thought goes into the crafting of engaging assignments. Most of these, however, often remain invisible and disappear into the archived folders of past courses and semesters. These assignments constitute a realm of complex knowledge, offer paths to it, and inspire further thought and action. They should be shared and made accessible within a growing community of learners. .
Teaching design/ing involves multimodal approaches and experiments to shape common futures as a way of collaborating and co-creating worlds as a shared epistemic practice. A care-full pedagogy can enable different ways of knowing and integrate academic, local, implicit, Indigenous as well as embodied forms of knowledge. This approach also focuses on creating new spaces and methods for learning and acquiring various ways of knowing and skills in designing.
Inspirational Tools for Contemporary Design Education
The assignments we invite for submission make use of creative methods and have taken place in and beyond the classroom and further learning spaces – the city, the forest, and elsewhere. Assignments can range from the making of artefacts at various scale (object, body, space) to collective and critical mapping, could include technology or digital collaborators, could include social science methods such as oral histories or participant observation, can include text, images, description of olfactory, auditory, tactile, and gustatory experiences,material explorations, and so on.
We intend this edited volume to be a toolkit for design educators, practitioners as well as enthusiastic creative people. A toolkit, where experiences can be shared, creative efforts in design pedagogy become visible, and where all invested in design teaching and methods find a rich ground to draw from and contribute to.
Submission
Please provide in a docx (10 MB max.):
- a title for your assignment (not the course title)
- Write a short statement (one sentence)
- Describe in a short text, what the prompt, probe, prototype, invitation is about (200-300 words)
- Attach 1-5 pictures (make sure, you have image rights) and add captions that not only give credit to the maker and/or photographer, but also shortly clarify.
- Add a short course info (course title, year, instructors)
- Add a short bio of 80–100 words with some background on your practice and/or research (plus your website, if you have one).
- Upon selection for publication, you will grant us permission to use your text and any images under the Creative Commons 4.0 license CC-BY-NC-ND. In case we make the publication also available via digital Open Access you will grant us permission to use your contribution in that way as well.
Please submit here forms.gle/wQcBfRGCbPzYVhbF8 until March 15, 2026.
We will get back to you with a decision on selected contributions by the end of May 2026.
Thank you very much!