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Full-Text Articles in Art and Design

Missing Species: Discursive Design Activism, Margaret Rynning Jun 2023

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 Jun 2023

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 Jun 2023

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 …


The Blank White Paper As A Disobedient Object, Yiying Wu, Karthikeya Acharya Jun 2023

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 Jun 2023

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 …


The Illusive Type: Hunting Typographic Simulacra, Kyle Rath Jun 2023

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, …


Scaling Bodily Fluids For Utopian Fabulations, Karey Helms, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Nadia Campo Woytuk Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 …


The Extension Of The Craftsman’S Hand By Robotics, Flemming Tvede Hansen Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

(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 Aug 2021

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 …


Places In The Making: How Fashion Design Transforms The Multitude Of Scales, Namkyu Chun Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 …


Object/Display/Architecture: Integrating Scales In Museum Exhibition Design, Ane Pilegaard Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 …


Challenges Of Downscaling And Upscaling In Human-Centered Design, Simon Nestler, Sven Quadflieg, Klaus Neuburg Aug 2021

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 Aug 2021

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 …


A Matter Of Scales: Experiential Evaluation As A Caring Platform Across Scales, Lieve Custers, Oswald Devisch, Liesbeth Huybrechts Aug 2021

A Matter Of Scales: Experiential Evaluation As A Caring Platform Across Scales, Lieve Custers, Oswald Devisch, Liesbeth Huybrechts

Nordes Conference Series

Densification, as a sustainable spatial development strategy, is a matter of care that takes place on multiple scales and is related to liveability in a paradoxical way. In this paper we approach this paradox related to densification as a “matter of scales” and work consciously with the tensions which arise when multiple actors act on multiple scales, such as a lack of communication and mistrust. We analyse and discuss how the participatory design approach of “experiential evaluation” supports this conscious approach by giving form to it as a caring platform around a “matter of scale” by connecting the multiple actors …


Co-Citizen Design Labs In Resilience Making, Stephanie Carleklev, Wendy Fountain Aug 2021

Co-Citizen Design Labs In Resilience Making, Stephanie Carleklev, Wendy Fountain

Nordes Conference Series

In this paper we share our resilience making approach for a first year design program in which we work intentionally with scale – through the subject matters of resilience, and through our learning design. We respond to the provocation of matters of scale in design to progress our design research in two ways. The first contributes to discussion of design education's remit from within ecological and existential crises, relative to expanding (design) knowledge. We then give focus to the co-citizen design lab that students conduct to illustrate how the inter-scalar relations we explore manifest through students' design action. Here we …


Attempting To Resist Ontological Occupation When Designing For Scale In Healthcare, Josina Vink, Felicia Nilsson, Thiago Freitas, Shivani Prakash Aug 2021

Attempting To Resist Ontological Occupation When Designing For Scale In Healthcare, Josina Vink, Felicia Nilsson, Thiago Freitas, Shivani Prakash

Nordes Conference Series

Scholars have recently called out how design is complicit in ontological occupation, where one reality makes other realities non-existent. The perpetuation of ontological occupation is a particular risk when designing for scale in healthcare, as Western healthcare is a recognized carrier of modern universalist practices that threaten local ways of caring. In this research, we draw from science and technology studies and anthropology to inform a research through design study positioned within a collective effort to scaleup decentralized care models in Norway. We analyse five attempts at resisting ontological occupation through design and, by doing so, contribute with lessons for …


Beyond A Living Lab: Scaling Social Innovation, Signe Yndigegn, Lone Malmborg, Maria Foverskov, Eva Brandt Aug 2021

Beyond A Living Lab: Scaling Social Innovation, Signe Yndigegn, Lone Malmborg, Maria Foverskov, Eva Brandt

Nordes Conference Series

This paper reflects on experiences with practicing and scaling a social innovation concept that was co-produced between public and private partners and citizens in a living design laboratory in Denmark from 2009-2012. The concept is a public service supporting ad-hoc exercise communities for senior citizens in public parks, based on playful activities. This paper builds upon follow-up studies which have been made since the project ended. We discuss how practicing the service unfolded over time, and how two municipalities have attempted scaling the concept. We deepen the understanding of theoretical concepts of scaling with experiences from practice by e.g., discussing …