NCBDS 42
February 25-27, 2027
Welcome to the National Conference on the Beginning Design Student 42 (NCBDS 42) hosted by the School of Architecture at Oklahoma State University. This site provides information about the conference to be held in spring 2027. We look forward to welcoming you to Stillwater, Oklahoma!
SUBMISSIONSThe theme of this year's conference is bad.
This conference will explore the concept of “bad” in architecture and design, and how its consideration can instigate counterintuitive methods for teaching, research, and design. We immediately face many questions when we consider the bad, such as:
- Bad in what ways?
- Bad for whom?
- Bad from whose perspective?
Conversely, we can establish what we mean by bad by defining its opposite:
good.
While using these binary terms is reductive, the use of a good/bad dichotomy is common and often conceals disciplinary values that we don’t always recognize, acknowledge, or verbalize. These values are core beliefs within our respective fields of design informing how we judge whether something is good or bad. Therefore, by examining definitive statements we make regarding what is bad, we can begin to uncover the underlying claims we make about architecture and design.
As educators, especially for beginning design students, we should be acutely aware of the power we hold in conveying to our students what is good and bad: through presenting new information to them, critiquing their work, and assessing their performance.
Choosing a theme of bad for a conference is intentionally a provocation; while we recognize that “good” and “bad” are somewhat problematic terms, we invite you to join us in not shying away from them, realizing that each of us probably finds ourselves using these terms at times in our teaching. Through papers, presentations, and discussions at the conference, we’re interested in examining the bad to question our inherited value systems and think counter-intuitively to challenge how things “have always been done.”
This diversity is already the great strength of the NCBDS community: it is a resource packed with counterintuitive pedagogical ideas implemented and shared by design faculty from all over the country. This year’s conference will be a time when we focus on these approaches as they pertain to the provocation of the bad. Doing so will help us all become better and more considered instructors in a world that is constantly becoming more complex, by tapping into this latent potential that is such an integral part of the NCBDS community.
