Please note the 2024 summer school is now over. The next summer school will be held online between 20 May and 12 June 2025. It will be organised by the International Institute for Information Design (IIID). This information will remain on the Simplification Centre website until it is transferred to IIID.
The online summer school involves twice-weekly 3-hour sessions over four weeks. Each session includes short talks and discussions, with homework between times (video lectures, and practical exercises). Expect around 40 hours of lectures, discussions and practical work.
At the summer school you will meet with experts in information design with a depth of experience in design practice, research and education, and who cover a range of different specialisms: diagramming, typography, clear writing, content structure, design education, health information design, financial information, government information, management communications and legal information design.
Meet the tutors
Of course, there's only so much we can teach and you can take in, in a short programme. But we introduce you to the field, explain key concepts and point the way forward. You'll go away with contacts in the field, and ideas to pursue. Past summer schools have inspired people to enrol in a degree course, work on projects together, write books and start businesses.
When the summer school is face to face, we hold many critiquing sessions to share our work. When we're online we use Mural whiteboards instead (below).
Past summer schools have been attended by people from as far afield as Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Lebanon, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, UK, Ukraine, and USA.
There are sessions devoted to design critiquing, visualisation, typography and layout, design patterns and genres, and user testing.
There are also practical exercises. Learning about design can’t be done just by listening to lectures – it comes through the struggle to find order in complex information, and to create new ways to communicate it to users.
We provide a Certificate of Participation to all those who attend. This is not a qualification and the course is not assessed.
The 2024 summer school cost €465, but the price of the 2025 one has not yet been announced. There are a few student places at a discount, and we also offer lower prices for people in low income regions.
The summer school is organised in partnership with the International Institute for Information Design (IIID).
We send you a set of theory flashcards to underpin our teaching and our design critiquing, together with basic tools for design sketching. We ask you to bring good and bad examples of information design, and we put key theories into action to explain why your examples work well, or fail.
We use short projects and exercises to put concepts into action. This team is working in the Vienna Designforum where we held the 2023 summer school.
When we travel, information designers help us find the way. When we buy things, they help us to make informed choices.
When we pay tax or claim benefits, they explain our rights and responsibilities and make the process run smoothly.
They reveal what data means, they help us find information quickly, and they explain how complex systems work.
Information designers help us understand health and healthcare systems. When the pandemic came, they helped experts to explain it and they showed us how to keep each other safe.
We realise the scheduled times make it hard to join the summer school from time zones in these regions. The summer school lectures will be recorded and if we can find enough people to form a viable group, we are prepared to run discussion sessions at a time that works for you (0800 UTC). We have had enquiries from several people and encourage others to get in touch (info@simplificationcentre.org.uk)
