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Articles 1 - 30 of 390
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Illusive Type: Hunting Typographic Simulacra, Kyle Rath
The Illusive Type: Hunting Typographic Simulacra, Kyle Rath
Nordes Conference Series
Typically, when evaluating iconic typefaces, we investigate the degree to which they communicate well-established connotative narratives. Helvetica, for example, is an icon of simplicity and clarity and so, is applied across various designs to exude similar tones. Bodoni, a showpiece of Neoclassicism, detailing and adornment facilitated by technological advancement during the 18th century Industrial Revolution, often appears in designs suited to premium brands. Iconic typefaces such as these are tied to their symbolism; it appears that their symbolic ‘myths’ have ‘always been so.’ As I demonstrate however, there are examples of iconic typefaces whose myths are in fact entirely fabricated, …
The Blank White Paper As A Disobedient Object, Yiying Wu, Karthikeya Acharya
The Blank White Paper As A Disobedient Object, Yiying Wu, Karthikeya Acharya
Nordes Conference Series
On November 24, 2022, the White Paper Protests were started by Chinese people to protest against China’s strict zero-COVID policy and excessive censorship during the pandemic lockdown. In the protests, blank white papers were used as a means of protest. Framing the blank white paper as a ‘disobedient object’, our paper intends to capture a glimpse of the aesthetic composition of the protest movement. For this we collected responses from 42 Chinese citizens about their views of ‘white paper’. Based on the data, we interpret the aesthetic composition of the protest movement in three parts, ‘Blank Means:’, ‘Blank Fiction’ and …
Nothing About Us Without Us: The Journey Of Digital Accessibility In The Making, Luciana Terceiro
Nothing About Us Without Us: The Journey Of Digital Accessibility In The Making, Luciana Terceiro
Nordes Conference Series
This exploratory paper aims to discuss and reflect on digital accessibility practices in developing projects and products, focusing mainly on design activities. Digital accessibility is a characteristic of digital products and services like websites that allows people with disabilities to access and use them. Although its relevance, accessibility is not present in many technological objects. When tech practitioners and companies are asked why accessibility is not a priority, several reasons are mentioned, like costs and the available development time. What would lay below the most apparent arguments? What constitutes an organisational culture that leaves factors such as accessibility behind? The …
Missing Species: Discursive Design Activism, Margaret Rynning
Missing Species: Discursive Design Activism, Margaret Rynning
Nordes Conference Series
Through a design case, “Missing species”, this article presents how design activism can be applied to a discursive design project and proposes a model for discursive design activism. The case study addresses the issue of biodiversity and invading plants due to humans’ interaction with nature and suggests how design may inform and engage societies and individuals through critical imageries, possibly leading to local engagement. Design activism and presenting design outside of galleries and spaces for designers may lead to a larger and more targeted audience for discursive design.
Guiding Students To Become Better Designers And Co-Designers Of Inner Sustainability: A Framework For Higher Education, Kirsten Bonde Sørensen
Guiding Students To Become Better Designers And Co-Designers Of Inner Sustainability: A Framework For Higher Education, Kirsten Bonde Sørensen
Nordes Conference Series
The COVID-19 pandemic was a wake-up call for humanity. The resulting slowdown demanded existential reflection and a need to reframe industrial values related to the acceleration and growth logic of the capitalist economy. The pandemic and the blank space it produced have initiated radical changes to respond to both human and planetary health challenges. In response, this paper suggests a life-centered design framework that includes a life-centred design attitude and a 4- foci model aimed at inner and outer sustainability. The 4-foci model entails an inner focus, an outer focus, an outer praxis/ business focus and an outer planetary/world focus. …
Conversations With The Body Of The Other: A Three-Step Dialogical Process, Nesli Hazal Oktay, Danielle Wilde, Kristi Kuusk
Conversations With The Body Of The Other: A Three-Step Dialogical Process, Nesli Hazal Oktay, Danielle Wilde, Kristi Kuusk
Nordes Conference Series
Embodied design ideation methods rely on subjective —first-person— experiences of the designer to bring new ways of designing into being. Shifting the embodied design ideation method to the body of the other, we propose a three-step process that makes the experiences of a dancer accessible to a designer for the ideation of remote intimacies. To support the access to the dancer’s experiences, we facilitate embodied, dialogical exchange over three phases: i) observation of embodied explorations between the dancer and a set of tangibles, ii) analysis of phase (i) visual documentation, and iii) a semi-structured interview with the dancer, using phase …
Scaling Bodily Fluids For Utopian Fabulations, Karey Helms, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Nadia Campo Woytuk
Scaling Bodily Fluids For Utopian Fabulations, Karey Helms, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Nadia Campo Woytuk
Nordes Conference Series
This paper explores human bodily fluids for morethan- human collaborative survival. We present four utopian fabulations in which urine, menstrual blood, and human milk are designed with beyond the scale of a singular human body. Each fabulation illustrates queer scales and uses of bodily fluids through extended or improper uses as pathways towards caring multi-species relations within a damaged environment. From these narratives, we reflect on imagining generous collaborations for an openness towards unknowable possibilities and crafting different measures through the tensions of coinciding scales.
Temporal Scales Of Participation: A Rift Between Actors And Spectators, Alicia Smedberg
Temporal Scales Of Participation: A Rift Between Actors And Spectators, Alicia Smedberg
Nordes Conference Series
Participatory design is a future-oriented discipline, but there is an imbalance in agency between those who produce future imaginations, and those who consume them. This paper argues that we, as designers and producers of future-oriented design interventions, hold responsibilities towards third party “spectators”. The paper departs from an incident that took place two years after a Future Workshop had taken place between public sector workers and citizens in Malmö, Sweden, when a concerned third party mistook the workshop’s potential and preferred imaginations of the future for truths. In the light of Hannah Arendt’s writings on imagination the paper separates actors …
On Wearing Diaries And Scaling Practices: Exploring Wardrobe Studies In Fashion Education, Julia Valle-Noronha
On Wearing Diaries And Scaling Practices: Exploring Wardrobe Studies In Fashion Education, Julia Valle-Noronha
Nordes Conference Series
This paper seeks to explore ways to promote scalar thinking in the field of clothing and fashion design education for more responsible futures by means of wearing diaries, a method in wardrobe studies. It does so through the case of activities carried in a bachelor level course in Fashion Design called Futurology at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In the course, students collect diary notes on their personal wearing practices during a semester alongside designing future-oriented design proposals for the field of clothing and fashion design. The final reflections suggest that by attuning to personal wearing practices design actions may …
The Extension Of The Craftsman’S Hand By Robotics, Flemming Tvede Hansen
The Extension Of The Craftsman’S Hand By Robotics, Flemming Tvede Hansen
Nordes Conference Series
This paper reflects ongoing research about how new technologies create new possibilities within crafting and how new technologies can build on traditional techniques within the field of ceramics. This research explores how the use of robotics extends the craftsman’s hand to utilise both the quality of the craftsman’s touch and the robot through wire cutting a lump of clay. The research shows how the craftsman can upscale the power and range of the craftsman’s hand and, at the same time, deal with small details and repetition beyond the work of the craftsman’s hand.
On Diy Cloth Face Masks And Scalar Relationships In Design, Joanna Saad-Sulonen, Andrea Botero, Mille Mille Mille
On Diy Cloth Face Masks And Scalar Relationships In Design, Joanna Saad-Sulonen, Andrea Botero, Mille Mille Mille
Nordes Conference Series
In this paper, we take the case of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) face masks as an entry point to questions of scale and scalar relations in design. We provide two example scalar trajectories that illustrate how DIY face masks - as everyday design artefacts - are in continuous shaping and re-shaping through various forms of active use and design. We also point out how scalar relations manifest in knowledge sharing and circulation of know-how, as DIY masks emerge in a world facing the same COVID-19 virus but within different local realities and relationships.
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 …
Living World Dynamics - Or: What Brian Eno Can Teach Us About Knowing In A Complex World, Connie Svabo
Living World Dynamics - Or: What Brian Eno Can Teach Us About Knowing In A Complex World, Connie Svabo
Nordes Conference Series
In questioning how we come to know the world, we have to maintain the insight that things can hang together in many ways and that the world always exceeds our modeling attempts, regardless of scale, weight and representation. Multiple orders are at play in the world and perhaps the best way to get a measure of a lively world is to move with it in performance. Modelling knowledge on endlessly unfolding and endlessly changing performance provides a way of researching the world in a lively manner: beyond static specification and blue-print simplifications. This generates a new relationship between world, knowledge …
Between Yarn And Electrons: A Method For Designing Textural Expressions In Electromagnetic Smart Textiles, Erin Lewis
Between Yarn And Electrons: A Method For Designing Textural Expressions In Electromagnetic Smart Textiles, Erin Lewis
Nordes Conference Series
The design of smart textiles presents a discrepancy of scale where the designer works at the level of structural textile design while facets of the material express at scales beyond one’s senses. Without methods to narrow this gap, certain expressional domains of the textile are closed off from design possibilities. The aim of the research has been to design a method for observing, visualizing, and describing expressions of electromagnetism in textiles. Through a method of textile surface scanning, one can produce a visualization of its electromagnetic field. Woven textile samples observed through this method reveal a textural quality that exists …
Rethinking Food: Co-Creating Citizen Science For Sustainability Transitions, Danielle Wilde, Anna Lena Hupe, Sarah Trahan, Caroline Guinita Abel, Solvejg Kjærsgaard Longueval, Corey Mclaughlin
Rethinking Food: Co-Creating Citizen Science For Sustainability Transitions, Danielle Wilde, Anna Lena Hupe, Sarah Trahan, Caroline Guinita Abel, Solvejg Kjærsgaard Longueval, Corey Mclaughlin
Nordes Conference Series
Transforming human food practices to be more sustainable is not straightforward. The human food system and international sustainability advice are both global in scope. Whereas food practices are locally situated and personal. ReThinking Food grapples with this challenge, using co-creative citizen science and the Future 50 Foods Report. The research involves cooking with; sharing food, recipes and stories; surveys, interviews, online and in-person activities. Through these actions, participants exchange knowledges with the food, their families and each other; become agents of change in their social groups and workplaces. They enact agency, shifting scales from human to nonhuman; near to far; …
Transitional Design Histories: Presenting History In Design, Maria Göransdotter
Transitional Design Histories: Presenting History In Design, Maria Göransdotter
Nordes Conference Series
In design, the big questions are typically not where we come from, but where we are heading. History, thus, rarely has a prominent place in the understandings of how, or why, design is done in certain ways. Yet, the methods, processes and ways of thinking that shape contemporary design practices have come about over time, and are thus historically constructed. This paper argues that making visible – present-ing – the historicity of designing is crucial to making visible mechanisms that work on a conceptual level of design, and that need to be addressed in the re-framing and development of emerging …
(Un)Weaving (Un)Sustainability, Sheida Amiri-Rigi, Despina Christoforidou
(Un)Weaving (Un)Sustainability, Sheida Amiri-Rigi, Despina Christoforidou
Nordes Conference Series
The spatio-temporal scale of design for sustainability has come full circle. What started within a technology-oriented global outlook, later evolving into a people-oriented and local view on change, now urges for a holistic, broad extent and multilevel design for sustainability. This paper enquires into the theories of social change that govern different approaches within the field, and positions the adhesion of socio-technical system innovation and transition design to classical modern theory, against an emergent design paradigm anchored in practice theory. By drawing on the literature of the field and comparing various models, a conceptual framework is suggested where "practice" serves …
Revealing Words For A Design Debate: A Design Lexicon Case, Yaprak Hamarat, Catherine Elsen, Çiğdem Çiğdem Çiğdem
Revealing Words For A Design Debate: A Design Lexicon Case, Yaprak Hamarat, Catherine Elsen, Çiğdem Çiğdem Çiğdem
Nordes Conference Series
In Autumn 2020, the Belgian association Wallonie Design dedicated to promoting design published a call tender to define and illustrate more than 100 words used in design practice. This Lexicon aims to complete an existing set of internal mediation tools, developed by the association to better explain the potential and benefits of design to different stakeholders and to promote design by and for other professions. Inter’Act research lab of University of Liege specialized in design and architectural research conducted this two-months project called “the Walloon Design Lexicon”. It was developed through a collaborative writing process, a call for illustrative examples …
A Tale Of A Wise City: A Speculation On Entanglements Of Non-Humans And Humans In An Urban Space., Inna Zrajaeva
A Tale Of A Wise City: A Speculation On Entanglements Of Non-Humans And Humans In An Urban Space., Inna Zrajaeva
Nordes Conference Series
This paper proposes methods for imagining a future which includes non-human stakeholders. The particular scenario is built on the concept currently known as Smart City. This exploration proposes a speculative fiction of a future where technologies in a Smart City are serving human and non-human citizens. The final outcome is a fictional documentary that illustrates life in the city from the viewpoint of its human citizens. To develop the concept of the city one of the primary challenges was to coordinate the many different scales, from the entire city structure to the interactions between the individual citizens. To address this, …
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 …
Thinking With/In The Wardrobe, Anna-Mamusu Sesay
Thinking With/In The Wardrobe, Anna-Mamusu Sesay
Nordes Conference Series
In this paper I discuss different scale-making practices related to the wardrobe. I will firstly discuss how locating a potential for more sustainable clothing futures within the wardrobe can be understood as a re-scaling project, shifting attention away from industry defined macro scales towards the micro scale where people’s engagements with their clothes are located. Based on a short vignette from my own fieldwork with five first-time mothers and their babies’ wardrobes I will then present the heuristic device thinking with/in the wardrobe, which I developed to think through different scales of abstraction found and applied to my empirical material. …
Multiple Lives Of The Products: An Investigation Of Products’ Journey In Freecycle Community, Ayşegül Özçelik, Ayşe Kaplan
Multiple Lives Of The Products: An Investigation Of Products’ Journey In Freecycle Community, Ayşegül Özçelik, Ayşe Kaplan
Nordes Conference Series
In today's needs, it is not enough to imagine products who have only one owner in their entire lives. To create more sustainable futures, designers might increase their ability to imagine multiple lives for things. To enable it, scale is the matter of concern. By increasing the usage scale, and examining the exchange of second-hand products informs designers by imagining multiple scenarios related to things lifes. In this paper we focus on local freecycle groups on Facebook in the context of the second-hand product’s circulation. In the field research, we identify significant usage cases of second-hand products that have multiple …
Scaling Up And Down: Landscape Design Processes And Choreographic Inquiry, Enrica Dall'ara, Melanie Kloetzel
Scaling Up And Down: Landscape Design Processes And Choreographic Inquiry, Enrica Dall'ara, Melanie Kloetzel
Nordes Conference Series
This paper focuses on matters of scales in the project Landscape in Motion, which involves creative research in the fields of landscape design and performing/digital arts. Landscape in Motion acts as an interdisciplinary inquiry into the relationship between urban infrastructures and the human scale, and it aims to define an innovative site-sensitive methodology for both urban design processes and site-based arts. Within the project, movement and dance act as a focal point to evaluate and highlight the social/environmental value of urban infrastructures. Integral to the project is the defining of an interdisciplinary lexicon as well as the development of a …
Scaling Up Diversity And Inclusion: From Classroom To Municipality, Annukka Svanda, Martina Čaić, Tuuli Mattelmäki
Scaling Up Diversity And Inclusion: From Classroom To Municipality, Annukka Svanda, Martina Čaić, Tuuli Mattelmäki
Nordes Conference Series
This paper investigates opportunities for scaling up the diversity and inclusion of international residents at the level of municipality service offerings. The starting point is a set of small-scale service design projects actively involving municipal representatives and university students. This collaboration was part of a service design course at Aalto University addressing challenges faced by the municipality of Espoo, Finland. Through triangulation of three data sources i) precourse meetings, ii) email surveys during the course, and iii) semi-structured interviews with participating municipal representatives after the course, this paper offers insights on how smallscale service design collaborations can facilitate the scaling …
Envisioning Large-Scale Effects Of Teaching Values In Design, Anne Linda Kok, Eva Eriksson, Elisabet Nilsson
Envisioning Large-Scale Effects Of Teaching Values In Design, Anne Linda Kok, Eva Eriksson, Elisabet Nilsson
Nordes Conference Series
In teaching, there is an increased awareness about the role that values play in design. In this paper, we envision potential large-scale effects of teaching values in design in higher education. In doing so, we practice what we preach, as we ourselves perform the envisioning method we normally teach our students. By applying this method to our teaching, we are scaling up the definition of “learning outcomes” from classroom-level results to societal outcomes. Specifically, we envision these potential outcomes by creating value scenarios on the basis of four topics – stakeholders, time, values, and pervasiveness. The contribution of this paper …
Object/Display/Architecture: Integrating Scales In Museum Exhibition Design, Ane Pilegaard
Object/Display/Architecture: Integrating Scales In Museum Exhibition Design, Ane Pilegaard
Nordes Conference Series
Even though it is widely recognized that museum objects, display design, and museum architecture greatly affect each other when it comes to museum exhibitions, their actual integration – during both the process of developing exhibitions and in the final result – is often lacking. This paper will explore an alternative approach to museum exhibition design, in which object scale, display scale, and architectural scale are integrated and worked with as a single malleable design material. Based on the analysis of a student project conducted at the MA program Spatial Design at the Royal Danish Academy and drawing on theoretical perspectives …
Where Did The Body Go? Re-Framing Human Scale, Andrea Victoria Hernandez Bueno, Cecilie Breinholm Christensen, Shelley Smith
Where Did The Body Go? Re-Framing Human Scale, Andrea Victoria Hernandez Bueno, Cecilie Breinholm Christensen, Shelley Smith
Nordes Conference Series
Scale can be considered as both a cartographic tool for design that allows designers to work with large scale objects such as buildings and urban spaces. However, scale is equally a relational understanding of the sensorial and perceptive reactions of the human body to its surrounding environment. As designers it is important to not only consider the human body as a measuring stick for dimensioning space according to standardised solutions and building codes, but also in a sensorial capacity as a perceptual tool for embodied experiences. Especially in ‘large scale’ design, the human body is easily lost in the zooming …
Troubling The Impact Of Food Future Imaginaries, Danielle Wilde, Marketa Dolejsova, Sjef Van Gaalen, Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Hilary Davis, Paul Graham Raven
Troubling The Impact Of Food Future Imaginaries, Danielle Wilde, Marketa Dolejsova, Sjef Van Gaalen, Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Hilary Davis, Paul Graham Raven
Nordes Conference Series
Global scale transformation is urgently required if we hope to stabilise socio-ecological systems. While design contributes to social and ecological un-sustainability, it can also play a pivotal role in bringing us towards more positive, inclusive ways of living and being within the planetary ecosystem. Experimental, co-creative design provides powerful tools for prompting critical thinking and inspiring new imaginaries. We engage with these possibilities, and explore their role in societal transition. We present an experimental food design workshop that aims to engender fantastical and plausible possibilities for regenerative (more-than- human) future food practices. We reflect on how to move from such …
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 …
Big Data And Small Beginnings – How People Engage With Data Physicalizations, Jacob Buur, Jessica Sorenson, Christina Melanie Cooper
Big Data And Small Beginnings – How People Engage With Data Physicalizations, Jacob Buur, Jessica Sorenson, Christina Melanie Cooper
Nordes Conference Series
Data physicalization has emerged on the design scene as a way of making sense of big (quantitative) data. This study explores how bigdata physicalizations are designed, how people engage with them, and how that spurs innovation. Graduate student designers created 15 data physicalizations to engage bus planners and bus passengers at multi-stakeholder workshops in discussing bus services and bus designs. The physicalizations were based on passenger data from 9 city bus routes. We used dimensional analysis to scrutinize the data physicalizations as constructs and multimodal interaction analysis to understand how workshop participant interact with the physicalizations. Using the theories of …