Catalyzing research-to-practice conversations: A global, interdisciplinary and emergent symposium in the context of learning to design

This paper describes the design of an international symposium whereby design researchers and design educators from diverse disciplines form a learning partnership to advance design thinking. Concepts from three theoretical frameworks, the scholarship of integration, learning partnerships and complexity theory, were used to design interactions before, during, and after the symposium. This transformative approach provides a potentially more effective means than the traditional diffusion model (research-disseminate-adopt) to translate educational research into teaching practice.