Speculative design is being promoted as a critical approach to design. Speculative design does not attempt to predict the future. Instead, it attempts to create debate and discussion about preferable futures (Dunne & Raby 2013). Design educators and practitioners from the Global South have become increasingly critical of speculative design practices (Martins 2014). This paper provides an account of a speculative design project set for final-year students pursuing a degree in Digital Media Design at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. The paper describes the project brief, the purpose of the assignment and the intended outcomes. Three student designs are presented and explored using a textual analysis methodology.

Aquaculture has become the fastest-growing animal production sector globally, with production in Africa especially, steadily increasing. The move from subsistence to commercial fish farming requires emerging farmers to access technical information and support services. In order to address this need, the Rural Fisheries Programme, a developmental unit with the Department of Ichthyology and Fisheries Science at Rhodes University, South Africa, developed Buna Africa.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the deep cracks of inequality within the South African educational system (Gustafsson & Deliwe, 2020). The fourth industrial revolution (4IR) has presented a range of new technology applications (Lacy, Long, & Spindler, 2020). These technologies can be leveraged to provide more equal access to the technology needed for remote learning (Du Preez & Sinha, 2020). This paper uses a systemic design approach to reflect on the challenges faced in design education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Student feedback on the online learning experience during the COVID-19 lockdown was reflected on. Observations were organised in themes and then explored using the first step of Namahn and shiftN’s Systemic Design Toolkit (Van Ael & Vandenbroeck, 2016).

Following a query in 2018 by the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) alumni office to establish in which industries or companies UJ alumni were predominantly employed, information was gathered by members of the department of Graphic Design and data accumulated on a large number of alumni from the Department of Graphic Design.

Typography is constantly shifting its form according to technologies and audiences. Understanding the constant motions of typography is critical in designing forms of visual communication. In addition, current digital technologies provide novel opportunities for users to participate and co-create new typographic conventions. Online ‘fandoms’ consist of communities with interests in cultural phenomena, ranging from fan art to celebrities, to artefacts. Fandoms are an example of user-generated content with strong typographic shifts.

Museum information and knowledge is persistently understood and communicated according to Eurocentric concepts and provides only a limited account of the experience of the museum environment as place.  In this paper we develop a conceptual framework to guide how Digital Imaging Technology (DIT) can change the situation to an inclusive, less hegemonic approach.

Decolonising digital media design education requires an investigation of possible techniques that can be taught to designers as a way of approaching interactive design with an emancipatory agenda. Traditionally, interactive-media studies have been taught from a positivist or psychological stance focusing predominantly on theories of human activity and cognition. In this paper I argue that the humanities offer an additional social and ethnographic lens with which to focus on the socio-historic, political and economic context of interactive media artefacts.

This paper probes two areas relating to transcoding culture in a website interface development context. Firstly, culture is interrogated through the lens of current anthropological models of dimensions (traits/tendencies) of national culture. Secondly, transcoding anthropological models of dimensions of national culture into culturally adaptive website interfaces through the graphic design process.

This paper attempts to look at digital media and design education at a university level exploring the question of teaching software and medium specific technical skills over broader theoretical and conceptual ideas of contemporary technologies. In the past, the focus of digital media programs has been conceptual experimentation and innovation, it seems pedagogy is now being driven purely by technical concern. The university system demands the technical aspect of "digital media" to be taught, but the field demands the creative and conceptual.