Heather Shaw and Brian Lucid featured speakers at 2008 Imagine IT 2 design conference.

The event comprised lectures, exhibitions and workshops by an international group of graphic designers, product designers, artists and scientists on the topics of design for human diversity and social inclusion. The conference took place from November 28 — 29 2008 and was organized by the Design Center Bologna in partnership with Typevents Italy, under the institutional patronage of EIDD Design for All Europe.

DMI alumna (MFA, 2003) and frequent visiting critic Heather Shaw opened the conference with a talk entitled Encode/Decode. Her presentation focused upon the role of web accessibility and compliance in undergraduate graphic design curriculum, proposing a method for teaching web standards via a process of deconstructing printed works from the masters of 20th century typography.

DMI faculty member Brian Lucid later presented a talk entitled Questioning the Click that described his integration of physical computing into communication design education. The presentation included several case-study projects that challenged graduate and undergraduate level communication design students to consider the language of digitally-mediated experiences.