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This paper discusses the status, objectives and procedures of contemporary industrial design education. It points out that professional designers are searching for meaningful and valid guidelines for the relatively new profession, and that current attitudes and practices in design education reflect this search. The major historical movements contributing to current industrial design training are reviewed briefly. The early marriage of industrial design and the visual arts is noted, as is the increasing interdisciplinary nature of industrial design education exemplified by its extension into many new but related fields such as human factors engineering. General descriptions of typical and atypical contemporary academic programs in industrial design education are presented. Reference is made to the important contribution of the professional association of industrial designers in support of design education, the Industrial Designers Society of America.

"We have entered the period of Big Data, where huge amounts of information can be gathered and processed with ever greater speeds, where algorithms have become so refined that they can predict behavior and tell us what we want. Increasingly, graphic designers and illustrators try to understand what all the information we have collected really means and how we can make sense of it to improve our personal and professional lives. This is not new: humans have been trying to map their worlds since they could draw. More recently, in our Information Age, many publications have collected examples of information graphics. Infographic Designers' Sketchbooks, however, is the first publication to get behind the finished image, to reveal how a stack of numbers could be transformed into a beautiful image rich with meaning and explanation. From the political charts of the New York Times to gadget instruction manuals, from creating a narrative out of complex process or spaces to mapping physical fitness, visualizing data is one of the preoccupations of our day. This timely publication, which will appeal to graphic and interaction designers as well as information visualizers across all media and subjects, offers a deeper understanding of how a diverse range of designers attempt to explain our world"--

Educational programs designed to bridge the digital divide for girls often aim to increase girls' technological literacy. However, little research has examined what aspects of technological literacy are highlighted in these programs. In this article, I provide a case study of a video game design workshop hosted by a girls' advocacy organization. Through observations, interviews, and analysis of program materials, I look at how the organization conceptualizes technological literacy as contributing to gender equality. I compare this conceptualization to how technological literacy was taught in the classroom. Finally, I draw on situated learning theory to help explain how girls responded to the class. In the end, both the organization's limited notion of how technological literacy could increase gender equality as well as gender and race differences between the teachers and the girls influenced girls' participation in the workshop.