On 12 October, Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski, co-founders of Tactical Tech, will be speaking at the Teach-in for Ecological Literacy in Design Education, at the V&A museum in London. Hosted by design group, Ecolabs, the event has already drawn an audience of over 300 design students and educators from several UK universities as well as those who will be watching the live internet broadcast at 22 international universities.

A range of experts on design and environmental issues will be speaking at the event, challenging design educators and students to engage with critical environmental issues in the work they teach and produce. According to the Teach-in initiative, "Design education must embrace its unique ability to facilitate change by: engaging with the concept of ecological literacy, communicating key concepts of environmental sustainability, and initiating a wide-reaching social learning process." The organisers hope that the Teach-in will achieve this through the collective learning experience among students, educators and experts.

Stephanie and Marek will be speaking on Design Activism – part of what we, at Tactical Tech, refer to as info-activism: an approach which helps rights advocates utilise information, communications and digital technologies to enhance their advocacy work. Tactical Tech works with rights advocates and designers to create effective visual advocacy campaigns in many global locations. From this experience, Stephanie has found that designers and rights advocates often struggle to communicate and work together because their fields and expertise are so separated. "We often find ourselves acting as interpretors, helping rights advocates find their story lines and deciding exactly what they want to communicate through info-design and then instructing designers on how to create the message visually." She believes that a greater engagement with critical current issues like climate change in design education and practice would go some way toward closing this intuitive gap between designers and rights advocates.

To find out more about the Teach-in and the programme of events in London, visit the Teach-in site. To find out more about info-design for advocacy, read the Tactical Tech guide, Visualising Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design.