近些年来，中国美术学院设计艺术学院在设计教育以及教学改革中，一直强调设计要关注社会问题、前沿趋势和科技进步带来的现实问题，从过去追求形式美学到回应新时期社会发展的紧迫议题。重新解释人与人之间的沟通关系，人和周围环境的感知关系、人和媒介的交互关系，激发设计在对新媒介、新领域的知识体系建设，通过主动设计开启改变社会的意识。这种对当下危机的研究和未来世界的思索将是我们当前和未来持续进行的研究课题。

本届2021中国美术学院设计艺术周，有来自不同国家、地区和专业背景的学者们和我们进行线上与线下对话，相信会形成生动的思想碰撞。让我们共同探讨：如何真正地进入新时代的意境之中，在新的人类现场，勇敢地完成设计系统的迭代，重建新时代的有为之学。

Looking back the tradition, global network has merged the cultural and temporal differences across regions, and human activities have far more beyond the national and regional limitations and barriers, challenging the inner logic of cultural globalization and localization. In the spiritual nihilism that follows the consumerism, we have been led back to the ‘tradition’. In the midst of the humanistic crisis, how to re-evoke the inner vitality of traditional culture, breaking through the dimension of human and technological experience, keeping the tradition alive, re-inventing the everyday life, and constructing a new cultural ecology and innovation system on the basis of digital ecology. The exploration of a new era of ‘Renaissance’ is now emerging.

Apparently, the technological and industrial revolution has brought us countless new things, and digital, intelligence and networks are forming the forces that will determine the future. In the smart manufacturing scape, digital design transforms user needs into sets of instructions for supply chains and smart factories, and integrating senses, decision-making, design, implementation and service into a product eco system, consolidating the user big data and large-scale customization into value transformation, and becoming an important engine and driver of smart manufacturing. What we created, what we thought, and what we mastered the innovative methods and tools are all needed to redesign, reconstruction, and reflection on a new journey.

Forward-looking to the metaverse is exploring the Extended Reality , blockchain, cloud computing, and Digital Twin. It merges the network, hardware and users into a perpetual, wide-coverage hybrid virtual and real world system. Today we have recognized the convenience of big data and artificial intelligence, tomorrow we may have to face a world that is as indistinguishable from the real and the fake as Zhuangzi’s dream of a butterfly. Brain-like intelligence, quantum computing, brain-computer interfaces, controlled fusion ...... a fastest and unprecedented scale of change and migration has already begun.

In this way, design, as a way of thinking and practicing that enables humans to understand and transform the world, has become an important driving force in the development of the diverse cultural landscape in where we live, and has given us the strength to confront the world.

As design concerns what to be concerned, 

we are researching knowledge by knowledge, 

and exploring design of designing.

For the challenges of the current living environment and the development of human society, regardless the spiritual and material worlds, design should be truly concerned with the survival, health and development of people, maintaining sensual vitality and spiritual autonomy in an increasingly intelligent, automated and virtualized society, building a new development pattern of a ‘digital society’ that is continuously ecological, humanity and intelligent, and opening up a smart life in the era of the Internet of everything.

At the same time, the iteration of technology, the revolution in learning and the post-epidemic era of ‘globalization and counter-globalization’ have changed our understanding of production and consumption, as well as our material and spiritual perceptions and imagination of the future. The 'landscape' of the new century has emerged; everyone is encountering a technological revolution and participating in this cognitive changes. To this ever-changing and complex world of the future, as educators, we must think about whether design education should leave behind the used ideas and forms, we must apply the latest science and technology to the latest realities, thereby developing new sensibilities, new physical and mental experiences, and starting a new spiritual horizon.

Today, we might use ‘meta’— the study of studying, and the research science of science.

After the ‘re-’ for 2020, 2021 started with ‘meta’, to exploring how to design ‘design’.

In the recent years, in a process of design pedagogy reforms, the School of Design CAA has emphasized that design should focus on social, cutting-edge trends and practical issues in the technological progress, from pursuing formal aesthetics in the past to responding to the urgency of social development. Reinterpreting the communication between people, the perceptual relationship between people and the environment, and the interaction between people and media. It inspires the construction of the knowledge system of new media and new fields in design, and initiates the consciousness of changing society through active design. This kind of research on the current crisis and thinking about the future world will be our ongoing research topic for the future.

CAA Design Week 2021 therefore invites researchers from different countries, regions and professional backgrounds, conducting online and offline dialogues, which is believed to exchange new ideas. Let us discuss how to immerse the context of a new era, bravely confronting the iteration of design systems in a new human scape, and reconstructing the science of promising in a new era.