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Articles 1 - 30 of 86
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Teaching Design For Sustainability From The Classroom: Uncomfortable Reflections From A Comfortable Place, Eeva Berglund
Teaching Design For Sustainability From The Classroom: Uncomfortable Reflections From A Comfortable Place, Eeva Berglund
Nordes Conference Series
The paper describes co-teaching on a masters programme with design for sustainability at its core. The programme puts emphasis on involving multiple societal stakeholders but increasingly also on appreciating the often tricky social and value-laden dimensions of designing better futures. In this context, we seek to foster students’ imagination and support their utopian thought and futures-oriented design. The classroom experience shows that this is achievable through rather conventional academic practices, ones rooted in disciplinary insight and empirical and historical research. The paper also suggests that enhancing students’ self-critical understanding of their own situatedness, even their own comforts, by grounding both …
Anticipating The Futures Of The Gender Dimension In Research: Storying Entangled Practices And Bodies, Eva Durall, Netta Iivari, Mervi Heikkinen, Suvi-Tuulia Pihkala, Marianne Kinnula
Anticipating The Futures Of The Gender Dimension In Research: Storying Entangled Practices And Bodies, Eva Durall, Netta Iivari, Mervi Heikkinen, Suvi-Tuulia Pihkala, Marianne Kinnula
Nordes Conference Series
In recent years, scholars have been increasingly urged to address a gender dimension i.e. sex and gender impact in research. In this study, we explore scholars’ explicit and implicit views about the future of implementing gender impact assessment (GIA) in research. We do so by analysing a series of co-design workshops in which participants anticipated possible futures regarding the use of a GIA checklist. We conduct a narrative inquiry of participants’ stories consisting of the personas and scenarios created at the workshops. Our analysis reveals silenced viewpoints and tensions for adopting GIA, while unveiling quite stereotypical bodies and practices in …
Decoding Design Briefs: The Role Of Abstraction Levels In Textual And Visual Stimuli, Sofie Busch, Nikoline Sander Jensen, Mário Barros
Decoding Design Briefs: The Role Of Abstraction Levels In Textual And Visual Stimuli, Sofie Busch, Nikoline Sander Jensen, Mário Barros
Nordes Conference Series
This paper investigates the role of stimuli and respective levels of abstraction in design briefs and the implications for client-designer expectations alignment. This paper examines design briefs in professional settings in two Danish companies, from the perspectives of the client who creates a brief and the external designer who responds to a brief. The method consists in analysing the design briefs and categorising content, type of stimuli and level of abstraction, followed by interviews with the sender and receiver of the brief. According to the findings, the definition of a clear solution space in the design brief occurs when there …
Designing Fertility Otherwise: Of Human, Animal And Soil Relations, Nadia Campo Woytuk, Joo Young Park, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Madeline Balaam, Marianela Ciolfi Felice
Designing Fertility Otherwise: Of Human, Animal And Soil Relations, Nadia Campo Woytuk, Joo Young Park, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Madeline Balaam, Marianela Ciolfi Felice
Nordes Conference Series
This exploratory paper unpacks the design space of fertility sensing, reflecting on current meanings and designs for fertility in humans, animals, and soil. Attending to the curious relations between these, we explore how fertility technologies share histories across patriarchal and capitalist visions of bodies and land. We provide a critical feminist analysis of fertility sensing and begin to unpack how design might approach this space otherwise, by means of exploratory prompts and opportunities that we call ‘design seeds’. We accompany the design seeds with four evocative images, engaging practically and materially with these opportunities, opening up for critical yet hopeful …
Generous Crowdedness: Cultivating Space(S) For Care At Alternative Design Museums, Anja Neidhardt-Mokoena, Heather Wiltse
Generous Crowdedness: Cultivating Space(S) For Care At Alternative Design Museums, Anja Neidhardt-Mokoena, Heather Wiltse
Nordes Conference Series
The design discipline is implicated in the trajectories that have led us to an unsustainable present. There is an urgency to re-direct the design discipline, so that it can become able to not only stay with past and present trouble, but also to develop other futures. To see how design museums might support change rather than preservation, we look to the example of protest archives. Based on an analysis of relational space, we suggest that the relative crowdedness of protest archives emerges out of matters of care, and allows for the development of alternative ways of being and creating. We …
Cultivating Ethics With Professional Designers, Sharon Lindberg, Petter Karlström, Sirkku Männikkö Barbutiu
Cultivating Ethics With Professional Designers, Sharon Lindberg, Petter Karlström, Sirkku Männikkö Barbutiu
Nordes Conference Series
Recent years have seen an increased interest in designers’ ethical responsibility. However, knowledge concerning how ethical practice could be cultivated in real-life settings is still lacking. In order to explore this issue, we formed a team with practitioners at a digital design studio. During 10 months, the team co-designed activities and materials intended to sensitize design practitioners at the studio to ethics. Our findings highlight the importance of presenting ethics in an appealing manner in order to engage designers, and this paper illustrates how we explored this in our project. Moreover, we discuss co-design as a collaborative space for engaging …
Factory Fieldwork Informing The Design Research Process, Ana Correia De Barros, Catarina Correia, Daniel Silva, Liliana Cunha, Susana Brito, João Rui Pereira
Factory Fieldwork Informing The Design Research Process, Ana Correia De Barros, Catarina Correia, Daniel Silva, Liliana Cunha, Susana Brito, João Rui Pereira
Nordes Conference Series
Engaging with manufacturing operators in design research poses a myriad of challenges ranging from ethics to logistics. We describe a process of qualitative, mixed-methods, non-participant fieldwork user research involving 10 garment factory workers created to inform the design of technology to support operators’ physical and mental health. The resulting data were subjected to thematic analysis which identified themes that informed not only the design of technology, but also the co-design process itself. In this paper, we explore the latter as a contribution to design research methods, discussing the implications of analysing user research data towards informing design researchers’ behaviour in …
Mapping And Sensing Dewey's Situations As Design And Social Science Methods, Christian Nold
Mapping And Sensing Dewey's Situations As Design And Social Science Methods, Christian Nold
Nordes Conference Series
This exploratory paper proposes the use of pragmatist philosophy as a methodological bridge between design and the social sciences. It develops John Dewey’s ecological notion of the ‘situation’ into two novel methods for sensing and mapping situations. The first method, called ‘sensing situations’, aims to help designers become more aware of the diverse elements that make up a situation and develop a deeper understanding of it through embodied experience. The second method, called ‘mapping situations’, is based on Adele Clarke's concept of ‘situational mapping’ and is intended to identify key actors, power dynamics, and areas for design intervention within a …
Holding Space For Wellbeing: Care And Ethics Of Exclusion, Irene Kaklopoulou, Pedro Sanches
Holding Space For Wellbeing: Care And Ethics Of Exclusion, Irene Kaklopoulou, Pedro Sanches
Nordes Conference Series
In this exploratory paper, we consider how an ethics of care can be applied to designing for health and wellbeing. We start from defining design as a careful assembling around absences and attending to things that are excluded, with the explicit intent of finding alternatives to how bodies are made through design. We discuss the potentials and challenges of holding space for idiosyncratic practices of wellbeing. We show how an ethics of exclusion can be deployed to analyse how we hold space in our own design processes and propose future research pathways.
Does Seeing Entail Believing? Visualising Information During Societal Crises, Elena Aversa, Michele Mauri
Does Seeing Entail Believing? Visualising Information During Societal Crises, Elena Aversa, Michele Mauri
Nordes Conference Series
Despite the shared belief that information visualisations are immune to manipulation, as visual stimuli, they “are no different from words in this regard, for any means of communication can be used to deceive” (Tufte, 1983). This paper discusses the power of information visualisation in engendering “a narrative experience” (Segel et Al., 2010) that cannot be considered politically neutral (Boehnert, 2016). In this sense, it can be compared to the concept of “tropes” (Haraway, 1988) which are narrative tools transmitting political and social agendas. The paper explores the existing literature addressing the circulation of information disorders (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2019) on …
Time As An Issue Of Power In Participatory Design, Helena Kraff, Eva Maria Jernsand
Time As An Issue Of Power In Participatory Design, Helena Kraff, Eva Maria Jernsand
Nordes Conference Series
Participatory design researchers address complex issues through collaboration with other actors. These can be communities, third sector organisations, industry or governmental bodies, as well as other academic disciplines. Collaborators are seen as knowledgeable, and empowerment, mutual learning and democratic processes are emphasised. However, such positive claims have long been undermined by skewed power relations, many of which are related to time. Time, an evasive phenomenon tending to escape visibility, is in this paper given centre-stage. The aim is to identify time challenges in participation, exploring their effects and social implications. The analysis of a project in Kenya reveals how time …
Supporting Mutual Imaginations Through Human-Material Interactions: A Toolkit As Form Of Access, Monja Hirscher, Irene Posch
Supporting Mutual Imaginations Through Human-Material Interactions: A Toolkit As Form Of Access, Monja Hirscher, Irene Posch
Nordes Conference Series
We introduce Mutual Imagination as a desirable outcome of Human-Material Interactions, proposing implications for the design of a toolkit that supports such activities. We aim to support Human-Material Interaction in an active, physical way, negotiating between learning foundational knowledge and supporting creative expression and imagination. The focus is set on process rather than finished objects, encouraging abstract reflection and the formulation of Mutual Imaginations emerging from a hands-on making activity. We report on the findings of a first case study utilizing the technology of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC), exemplarily probing the interconnection of knowledge, reflection, and making towards toolkits that …
Speculative Designs In Educational Settings: Tension-Patterns From A (Mostly) European Perspective, Enrique Encinas, Ingi Helgason, James Auger, Ivica Mitrović, Julian Hanna
Speculative Designs In Educational Settings: Tension-Patterns From A (Mostly) European Perspective, Enrique Encinas, Ingi Helgason, James Auger, Ivica Mitrović, Julian Hanna
Nordes Conference Series
The study of speculative designs (such as futures, critical design alternatives, or catalysts for reflection) is well documented in the design research community but the literature lacks attention to speculative designs in the service of a pedagogical practice. This paper reports on a two-year cross European research project investigating speculative designs in higher education contexts. We reflect on a broad data set including interviews, surveys, case studies and workshops involving educators and students. Our contribution draws on the results of this study to propose eight tension-patterns, each an interplay between opposing tendencies that educators and students need to address, more …
Rethinking Scale – Relationality, Place, And Critical Zone, Ole Jensen
Rethinking Scale – Relationality, Place, And Critical Zone, Ole Jensen
Nordes Conference Series
Scale is an important concept. It works in geography, architecture, urbanism and a number of other areas. It also works in the ‘real world’ of humans where it organizes societies and fuel politics. Scale gather people in collectives, as well as it works a political force for pitting them against one another. Hence scale is far from neutral. In this paper, we want to critically challenge an understanding of scale as something fixed, structural, obdurate, and ordered. Rather we encourage a thinking of scale as something related to fluidity, mobility, networks, and continuums. Rethinking scale along these lines is important …
Places In The Making: How Fashion Design Transforms The Multitude Of Scales, Namkyu Chun
Places In The Making: How Fashion Design Transforms The Multitude Of Scales, Namkyu Chun
Nordes Conference Series
This short paper questions what it means to make a sense of place through fashion design. The notion of placemaking has been discussed in the literature of design and fashion yet remains fragmented, especially due to the complex fashion system. The nuances of place should be carefully examined when relating to fashion design. The ways in which the notion of place is conceptualized in fashion are introduced to explore impacts of designing fashion in two very different scales: the geographical space, such as cities and nations, and the human body. Fashion design transforms these scales continuously through its dual system …
Challenges Of Downscaling And Upscaling In Human-Centered Design, Simon Nestler, Sven Quadflieg, Klaus Neuburg
Challenges Of Downscaling And Upscaling In Human-Centered Design, Simon Nestler, Sven Quadflieg, Klaus Neuburg
Nordes Conference Series
Design has power – to improve lives, to empower people and to break down barriers. Successful design requires (besides many other tasks) a comprehensive analysis and deep understanding of the target audience. However, current design approaches, for instance established in the field of Human Centered Design, lead to multiple biases: Design neglects a multitude of needs when it uses downscaling to make complex target groups manageable. Downscaling must therefore disproportionately consider special needs within the design process – and upscaling must be able to compensate these biases again. The approach presented in this paper delivers three benefits: Conflicts between general …
Tracing Matters Of Scale By Walking With Minerals, Petra Lilja
Tracing Matters Of Scale By Walking With Minerals, Petra Lilja
Nordes Conference Series
Most practices of design are dependent on materials, and an anthropocentric way of thinking matter as mere resource ready to exploit, dominates. This text attempts to counteract that mode of thinking about matter, by walking and thinking-with stones, minerals and fossils in a disused limestone quarry in southern Sweden. The text is folding together thoughts from philosophy of science and vital materialism with insights from the lithic, spatio-temporal scales of sedimented fossil archives of the quarry and situated experiential explorations taking place there. What emerged from the learnings of the minerals, and what this text contributes with, is a proposal …
Counter-Framing Design: Politics Of The 'New Normal', Sharon Prendeville, Pandora Syperek
Counter-Framing Design: Politics Of The 'New Normal', Sharon Prendeville, Pandora Syperek
Nordes Conference Series
In this paper, we introduce the concept of counterframes in relation to discourses of sustainability, and elaborate on it in correspondence with participatory design practices. We present our analysis through the lens of the ‘new normal’ in the wake of the pandemic, to demonstrate and unpack the complex and conflictual nature of emergent frames and counter-frame debates, evident within the field of sustainability. The paper draws on participatory activities and interviews with social movements and grassroots organisations. We present initial reflections on the ways in which design can productively engage with and address counter-frames, as they both fill in and …
Exploring Implications For Designing For Sociotechnical Transitions: Taking Reflexivity As A Matter Of Scale, Peng Lu, Daniela Sangiorgi
Exploring Implications For Designing For Sociotechnical Transitions: Taking Reflexivity As A Matter Of Scale, Peng Lu, Daniela Sangiorgi
Nordes Conference Series
There is increasing interest of design for paradigmatic and sociotechnical changes, in which the significance of actor is recognized. However, design studies that aim to connect actors at the micro level and sociotechnical systems at the macro level is limited. Based on institutional theory in sociotechnical theory, this paper proposes reflexivity as a useful concept to be associated with matters of scale in Design. Based on literature review, we explore the ways “cultivating reflexivity” has been applied in critical design, norm creative innovation and service ecosystem design. This preliminary work seems to suggest an evolution in the application of reflexivity, …
Amphibious Scales And Anticipatory Design, Andrew Morrison, Bastien Kerspern, Palak Dudani, Amanda Steggell
Amphibious Scales And Anticipatory Design, Andrew Morrison, Bastien Kerspern, Palak Dudani, Amanda Steggell
Nordes Conference Series
This paper considers dynamics between Anticipatory Design and relational ontological scales in imagining, articulating and shaping futures. This spans speculative, experimental and experiential engagement with imaginary futures for rethinking relations to the present and long-term sustainable ones. Such acts are situated as design futures literacies that encompass design fiction, extended choreography and arctic futurescaping. Drawing on three design fictive devices developed across two projects, a set of eight ‘Amphibious Scales’ we developed in the context of the Anthropocene. The scales are amphibious in their slipperiness and dynamic, and emergent status. Their genesis is given via accounts of the design fictive …
Identities Shaped By Creative (Design) Journeys, Stephen Awoniyi
Identities Shaped By Creative (Design) Journeys, Stephen Awoniyi
Nordes Conference Series
The current paper presents an exploration of creating or making. We interviewed several makers of creative work, using a creative piece each had made as a conversation core. Their descriptions of making journeys marked out coupling of processes and outcomes. Comanaging both structural components involved temporally-delimited stages of actional and conceptional unfolding. Doing and thinking, however, also sketched an outline of a personality at a moment in time. These were all fluid transactions. Based on accounts of making journeys which circumscribed person-work amalgamations, we described a dispersion of markers across a dispositional field negotiated by creators. The creative operation can …
Zoepolis: Non-Anthropocentric Design As An Experiment In Multi-Species Care, Monika Rosińska, Agata Szydłowska
Zoepolis: Non-Anthropocentric Design As An Experiment In Multi-Species Care, Monika Rosińska, Agata Szydłowska
Nordes Conference Series
The paper provides an introductory discussion and a curatorial case study on design practice that contributes to a constitution of a human and nonhuman community as well as challenges and expands the notion of care to other species. It starts with an examination of existing approaches to design that take into consideration relations between humans and non-humans. Departing from a critique of discussed perspectives we then introduce a concept of zoepolis based on theories of Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, Donna Haraway, Joanna Bednarek and Bruno Latour. In the second part of the article we discuss the exhibition “Zoepolis. Design …
Reparative Practices: Invitations From Mundane Urban Ecologies, Emmy Laura Perez Fjalland, Kristine Samson
Reparative Practices: Invitations From Mundane Urban Ecologies, Emmy Laura Perez Fjalland, Kristine Samson
Nordes Conference Series
The paper proposes a reparative turn in co-design towards an attention and sensitivity to more-than-human world-making practices in our urban environments. The notion of ‘reparative’ hold strings with the reparative system that an organism starts when damage is experienced. Thinking-with this biological, cultural and performatively, we propose the reparative as the starting point for learning to notice life-giving potentialities in the Anthropocene. Reparative practices are ethical and political in the sense that we are searching for life-giving practices that can move us beyond design practices in the Anthropocene. Hence, by bringing attention to environmental enchantments related to sensory everyday practices …
Advanced Resilient Practices: Demythologizing Design Heritage, Fahrettin Ersin Alaca, David Muñoz Alcántara
Advanced Resilient Practices: Demythologizing Design Heritage, Fahrettin Ersin Alaca, David Muñoz Alcántara
Nordes Conference Series
This paper presents an international research, exhibition and forum project that has been developing since 2016. The project aims to demythologize design’s consumerist Utopias and sectoral hierarchies as a series of temporary artistic and design interventions. By socio-historical analysis of politics of design, the project involves blurring the borders between exhibition, archival display, and action research. This involves pushing forward Pratt’s “contact zone” as a technological site of embodied advanced practice of design critique together with the exercise of dissent foregrounding ecology of practices. The present paper focuses on the project’s methods and research outcome concerning the case of Finnish …
Ecofeminist Understandings Of Care And Design For Sustainability Transitions: Towards A Theoretical Framework Of Work For The Degrowth Movement, Eeva Houtbeckers, İdil Gaziulusoy
Ecofeminist Understandings Of Care And Design For Sustainability Transitions: Towards A Theoretical Framework Of Work For The Degrowth Movement, Eeva Houtbeckers, İdil Gaziulusoy
Nordes Conference Series
The starting point of this paper is a recognition of the need for transitions to sustainability. This exploratory paper is a stepping stone for development of a theoretical framework for ways of imagining and acting upon ecofeminist degrowth futures based on design for sustainability transitions (DFST). The aim of the framework is to conceptualise the role paid and un(der)paid work in and for such transitions. In this paper, we bring together previous research of design for sustainability DFST, degrowth, and ecofeminist understandings of care as gendered work. With references to the multi-level perspective of system innovations, DFST investigates the niche …
Designing Care And Commoning Into A Code Of Conduct, Cindy Kohtala, Jedediah Walls, We-Left Collective
Designing Care And Commoning Into A Code Of Conduct, Cindy Kohtala, Jedediah Walls, We-Left Collective
Nordes Conference Series
Despite claims to being counterculture and a better alternative, grassroots activist design groups and free culture movements may replicate the marginalizing behaviours of dominant society, also in their governance and designs of their interaction platforms. We developed a code-of-conduct, or Community Guidelines, for our online commons-oriented group to nurture a sense of a caring and mutually responsible community. The guidelines aim to bring into online interaction the living person-to-person dialogic relationality we exhibit in collaborative work offline. Our social learning process could have implications for designing healthier online community protocols and platforms and be able to better tackle the challenges …
Testimonial Digital Textiles: Material Metaphors To Think With Care About Reconciliation With Four Memory Sewing Circles In Colombia, Jaime Patarroyo, Laura Cortés-Rico, Eliana Sánchez-Aldana, Tania Pérez-Bustos, Nasif Rincón
Testimonial Digital Textiles: Material Metaphors To Think With Care About Reconciliation With Four Memory Sewing Circles In Colombia, Jaime Patarroyo, Laura Cortés-Rico, Eliana Sánchez-Aldana, Tania Pérez-Bustos, Nasif Rincón
Nordes Conference Series
Research on textile crafting offers an opportunity to investigate reconciliation in a context that brings together every day practice, the realities of the conflict, the possibility of healing, and the rebuilding of social fabric. In this exploratory paper we deploy a methodological design which contributes to think about reconciliation with care through the practice of textile crafting in four memory sewing circles, integrated mostly by elderly women in different Colombian municipalities. This design implies the prototyping of a set of technologies that integrate digital components to various handcrafted textiles with the ability to digitally embody reconciliation in the selected sites, …
Who Cares About Those Who Care? Design And Technologies Of Power In Swedish Elder Care, Camilla Andersson, Ramia Mazé, Anna Isaksson
Who Cares About Those Who Care? Design And Technologies Of Power In Swedish Elder Care, Camilla Andersson, Ramia Mazé, Anna Isaksson
Nordes Conference Series
Design is increasingly recognized as an instrument of power. We explore power in the context of the Swedish welfare state and care institutions, which are undergoing political and structural reconfiguration as new technologies are introduced. Our aim is to better understand the effects of designed technologies within care institution and over care workers. Through our research, we have identified deviances, or gaps, between institutional policies and daily working practices, in which workers must cope within a grey zone of legality. Against this backdrop, we bring together and discuss concepts from philosopher Michel Foucault and sociologist Dorothy Smith in order to …
Iron While Still Damp, Julia Valle-Noronha, Marina Valle-Noronha
Iron While Still Damp, Julia Valle-Noronha, Marina Valle-Noronha
Nordes Conference Series
This exploratory paper looks into the relationship between people and the things they wear through the lenses of care and domestic labour. More specifically it addresses the practice of ironing and what it can offer to such relationships. The work collects data from wearers via deployed kits—containing a shirt and a diary—and a group discussion on the wearer-worn engagements. The results show that while little academic focus is given to domestic labour, ironing emerges as a practice that can share understanding of what lies behind the visuality of garments. It suggests that designers and researchers invest in further exploring the …
Technologies Of Division: Everyday Bordering, Silvia Mata-Marin, Dan Lockton
Technologies Of Division: Everyday Bordering, Silvia Mata-Marin, Dan Lockton
Nordes Conference Series
This paper explores how border thinking allows us to situate sociotechnical systems in everyday social processes as designed ‘bordering’ systems, regulating access and exerting control by embodying politics of difference in the context of everyday life for migrants in the United States. Through a discussion of everyday designed artifacts—credit cards and drivers’ licenses—the paper examines the tensions created in a process of acculturation, and calls for designers to attend to the ways in which designed artifacts embody larger political structures, becoming actors in the politics of inclusion/exclusion.