If everybody designs, what makes a designer?

Sign up now! 

You are invited you to the NADR Symposium of 2026, an interactive afternoon dedicated to exploring how the trend that everybody designs nowadays, affects the role of the designer.

Design is becoming increasingly important in higher professional education. Professionals need not only research skills to understand complex issues, but also design skills to envision and develop appropriate courses of action. As Herbert Simon observed “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”. It implies that not only students who aim to become professional designers need to be trained in design, but also professionals who design.

For professional designers, such as architects, product, fashion and multimedia designers, design is their core profession and expertise. For professionals who design, such as doctors and policymakers, it is a tool or methodology to address challenges and achieve goals, often referred to as design thinking. In Dutch, this distinction is captured by the terms professionele ontwerper and ontwerpende professional. In Dutch, this would be about the difference between the ‘professionele ontwerper’ versus the ‘ontwerpende professional’.

As institutes of higher professional education are both training professionals that design and professional designers it becomes all the more relevant to consider the role, significance and implications of design in education. NADR aims to map out the diversity of views, practices and tensions surrounding this topic through four lenses or analytical perspectives:

• Perspective 1. Blurred lines: design as professional identity?
• Perspective 2 Applied Design Research: win-win for students and researchers?
• Perspective 3. Design-Based Education: design as an educational process?
• Perspective 4. Design with impact: what can students achieve?

Read more about the perspectives here.

Event Details

• Date: Monday, 19 October 2026
• Time: 13:00 – 17:00
• Location: Microlab (Skybar), Kastanjelaan 400, Eindhoven
• Programme: Keynote by Kees Dorst, interactive workshop, collective synthesis, and networking more details will follow soon

Who should attend?

• Authors of accepted NADR 2026 contributions (at least one author per contribution is required)
• Designers, researchers, educators and partners interested the role of design in education.

Why join?

• Learn more about diverse perspectives on establishing insights in design in education and the role of the designer.
• Contribute your own expertise in a collaborative workshop format
• Networking

Sign Up Here! 

This event is supported by Taskforce for Applied Research SIA as part of the Research & Impact Pilot.