Keynote Speakers

• Rick Bennett, Founder & Director - The Omnium Project; Head - COFA Online; Sr. Lecturer In Design Studies, College of Fine Arts, UNSW
• Richard Goodwin, Professor; Director Porosity Studio, School of Design Studies, College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales
• Mark Burry, Professor of Innovation (Spatial Information Architecture), RMIT
• Kees Dorst, Senior Researcher, Dept. of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands), and Professor of Design, University of Technology Sydney
• Clive Dym, Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design, Center for Design Education, Harvey Mudd College (USA)
• John Frazer, Professor and Head of School of Design, Queensland University of Technology, and Research Co-ordinator, Gehry Technologies Digital Practice Ecosystem
• Richard Hough, New South Global Professor of Multidisciplinary Design, UNSW, and Principal, Arup Group, Sydney
• Young-II (John) Kim, Executive Vice-President for Design and Brand, Hyundai and Kia Motors, Korea
• Gilly Salmon, Professor of E-learning & Learning Technologies, Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester, UK
• Xing Ruan, Professor of Architecture and Head of the Architecture Discipline Group, UNSW

Invited Speakers

• Henry Petroski, Professor of Civil Engineering and Professor of History at Duke University, USA
• Associate Professor Janice Orrell, Director, Disciplines and Networks, The Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education
• Sue Rowley, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Research), University of Technology Sydney

Rick Bennett, Founder & Director - The Omnium Project; Head - COFA Online; Sr. Lecturer In Design Studies, College of Fine Arts, UNSW

In 1991, Rick joined the University of New South Wales where he is now Head of online learning & teaching at the faculty of the College of Fine Arts (COFA) and a senior lecturer in Design Studies.

In 1998, Rick founded The Omnium Project – a research group investigating the creative potential of fully online communities and the future these offered collaborative e-learning. Rick has published and presented Omnium's research widely, and received recognition through numerous awards and research grants. Nowadays he is invited to collaborate in research projects and give lectures alongside some of the world's leading names in e-learning. http://www.omnium.edu.au

Prof. Dr. Kees Dorst, Eindhoven University of Technology and University of Technology Sydney, The Netherlands

Dr Kees Dorst is Professor of Design at the faculty of Design, Architecture and Building of the University of Technology Sydney (Australia) and senior researcher at the department of Industrial Design of Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands). He is on the board of the ground- breaking foundation ‘Young Designers and Industry' (YDI), which develops completely new applications of design thinking in society. He is also a co-founder and organizer of the Amsterdam Creativity Exchange (ACX), a foundation set up to build the creative city of Amsterdam.

He is editor of the main Dutch design journal ITEMS.

In addition to these activities, he lectures at the Design Academy Eindhoven and at various other design schools and management institutes in The Netherlands and abroad, and works as a consultant in the fields of product design and product development. He is the author of four books and many papers on design, design education and design research. His main textbook for use by designers and design students is ‘Understanding Design', released in 2003.

Clive L. Dym, Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design, Director of the Center for Design Education, Harvey Mudd College, USA

Clive Dym's primary interests are in engineering design and structural mechanics.

After receiving the PhD from Stanford University, Dr. Dym has previously held appointments at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Bolt, Beranek and Newman; Carnegie Mellon University; the Institute for Defense Analyses; and the University at Buffalo. He was also head of his department at UMass (1977–85) and chair of his department at Harvey Mudd (1999–2002).

Dr. Dym has held visiting appointments at the TECHNION-Israel Institute of Technology, the Institute for Sound and Vibration Research at Southampton, Stanford, Xerox PARC, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, and USC. He has authored or coauthored 10 books and more than 100 archival publications and technical reports.

Dr. Dym was founding editor of the journal Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis, and Manufacturing, and is currently Associate Editor of ASME's Journal of Mechanical Design. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the American Society of Engineering Education.

Associate Professor Janice Orrell, Director, Disciplines and Networks, The Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education

Associate Professor Janice Orrell is a Director at the Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education in Australian. Her portfolios are Discipline-based Initiatives and Resource Identification Networks. Formerly, Janice was the Academic Coordinator at Flinders University. Her responsibilities were to assist academics engage in quality teaching and assessment and to support academic organisational units in the enhancement of their academic programs.

Her research fields are assessment in higher education and work-integrated learning, quality assurance in higher education, innovation in education, clinical education and the induction of academics to various aspects of their role, especially teaching and supervision. In 2001 she won a Australian Universities National Award of Excellence for the Flinders Foundation of University Teaching programme she devised for newly appointed academics. Many of the graduates of this programme have gone on to win Flinders University Excellence in teaching awards and Flinders Innovations in Teaching Grants. Her particular interest is forging authentic, generative links between professional organisations and higher education.

Henry Petroski, Professor of Civil Engineering and Professor of History at Duke University, USA

Henry Petroski has written broadly on the topics of design, success and failure, and the history of engineering and technology. His books on these subjects include To Engineer Is Human, which was adapted for a BBC-television documentary, and Design Paradigms, which was named by the Association of American Publishers as the best general engineering book published in 1994. His Engineers of Dreams is a history of American bridge building. He has also written books on commonplace objects, including the titles The Pencil, The Evolution of Useful Things, The Book on the Bookshelf, and Small Things Considered. A memoir about delivering newspapers in the 1950s and about what predisposed him to become an engineer is entitled Paperboy. His latest book, Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design, was published by Princeton University Press this past spring. Translations of his books have been published in a variety of languages, including Chinese, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. In addition to having published technical articles in refereed journals, Petroski has written numerous non-technical articles and essays for newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal .

Before moving to Duke in 1980, Henry Petroski was on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin and on the staff of Argonne National Laboratory. He is a professional engineer licensed in Texas and a chartered engineer registered in Ireland. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center. He is a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Institution of Engineers of Ireland, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Sue Rowley, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Research), University of Technology, Sydney

Professor Rowley has responsibility for research policy development and general oversight of the University's research activities, postgraduate education, industry liaison, intellectual property and commercialisation. Prior to her appointment in June 2004, Professor Rowley was Executive Director for Humanities and Creative Arts at the Australian Research Council (ARC) from February 2001 to May 2004. She served on the Humanities discipline panel from 1999-2000.

Professor Rowley was Foundation Professor of Contemporary Australian Art History and Head of the School of Art History and Theory at the University of New South Wales. She was President of the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS), Chair of the Board of Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design, and a member of the Australia Council's Visual Arts and Craft Board National Infrastructure Committee. Her research in contemporary art, craft and design resulted in both publications and curatorship of international touring exhibitions of contemporary Australian art, craft and design.

Gilly Salmon, Professor of E-learning & Learning Technologies, Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester, UK

Gilly Salmon is professor of e-learning  and Learning Technologies at the University of Leicester, where she is responsible for the academic development and co-ordination of the University's distance learning programmes, providing leadership for research into e-learning, guidance to senior staff and committees throughout the University on the development of e-learning. Her research is in areas of e-learning, distance learning and learning technologies, with particular interest in the management of change in universities and the role training and development of academic staff.  She joined Leicester in 2004, having previously worked at the Open University Business School, in the Centre for Innovation, Knowledge and Enterprise.  She has research degrees in both change management and educational technology

Dr Xing Ruan, Professor of Architecture and Chair of Architecture Discipline Group, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Professor Xing Ruan is the author of Allegorical Architecture (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), and New China Architecture (Periplus/Tuttle, 2006); his forthcoming edited book (with Paul Hogben ) is Topophilia and Topophobia: Reflections on Human Habitat in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2007). Xing Ruan has published on architecture and anthropology, architectural education, China's modern and contemporary architecture, as well as Australian contemporary architecture in both scholarly and professional journals. His essays have appeared in some of the world's leading scholarly journals, including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Journal of Material Culture. He has also contributed to professional journals such as Architecture Australia, Architectural Review Australia, and Jianzhu shi [The Architect] in China. Some of his writings can be found in Asia's Old Dwellings (Oxford, 2003), and Yung Ho Chang/Atelier Feichang Jianzhu- A Chinese Practice (MAP Book Publishers, 2003). He is co-editor, with Ronald Knapp, of the book series Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia's Architecture, which is published by the University of Hawai ‘i Press.

Xing Ruan currently is Professor of Architecture, and Chair of the Architecture Discipline Group at the University of New South Wales, Sydney . Prior to this appointment in 2004, he was Head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). From 2002 to 2004, Xing Ruan led a major redesign of the architectural course at UTS. He was the curator of a student work exhibition chosen as part of the Union of International Architects official exhibition in 1999. Born in China, he received his architectural education at the Southeast University in Nanjing.