Art and Design Commons^™

How Can We Come To Care In And Through Design?, Li Jönsson, Ann Light, Kristina Lindström, Åsa Ståhl, Mathilda Tham

Nordes Conference Series

On a generic level, caring can be described as "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible" (Fisher and Tronto, 1990). This paper asks how we as design researchers in Scandinavia come to care, for our world and more specifically for the local NORDES community. We do this by describing how we have maintained, continued and added (as a practice of repair) in relation to the most recent NORDES summer school (2018). The summer school invited students to work with tensions between despair, in a site …

Taking Care Of Plastic: Discursive Jewellery And Anthropogenic Debris, Synne Skjulstad

Nordes Conference Series

Tons of plastic waste pile up in our oceans by the minute. This paper discusses a jewellery design project where anthropogenic debris takes centre stage. The project investigates how marine plastic trash literally may be turned into treasures through approaches that transverse design, craft and communication design. The main design material are plastic pieces selected from the shores of Norwegian fiords. Each piece of plastic selected for jewellery is treated as precious. Care is thus a concept that frames this jewellery design project as it both connects to the micro and macro perspectives on plastic. The jewellery is relating aesthetic …

Health Cultures: Designing Healthcare Infrastructures As Urban Interfaces For Society Participation, Liesbeth Huybrechts, Katrien Dreessen, Irma Földényi, Daniela Dossi

Nordes Conference Series

This paper - based on the participatory design research project ‘Health Cultures, Healthcare and Multiculturalism’ - reflects on how we can redesign healthcare infrastructures as urban interfaces for citizens from different cultural backgrounds to participate more actively in society. The project investigates the health care systems and institutions of care in action, and how they develop within the context of a growing multicultural society and the declining welfare state. Via a design anthropological research in different health-related contexts within the city of Genk (Belgium), wherein 54% of the inhabitants come from foreign descent, we studied how these environments function as …

Empathy In A Technology-Driven Design Process: Designing For Users Without A Voice Of Their Own, Elina Ilen, Camilla Groth, Markus Ahola, Kirsi Niinimäki

Nordes Conference Series

Smart textiles are often developed in sports- oriented contexts through technology-driven processes. In the medical context, practitioners themselves also invent and develop technological aids in response to needs that emerge in practice. In these cases, novel technology may be the first driver for design to secure functionality and reliability, but our study shows that these processes benefit from human-centric and empathic design approaches. The project develops smart textiles for infants with medical adversities, such as preterm birth, neonatal infections, or birth asphyxia, collaboratively with medical researchers. Our pilot research illuminates the need to use the interest group’s empathic understanding as …

What Matters When Turning Utopias Into Material, Philip Hector, Mikko Jalas

Nordes Conference Series

With an increasing number of open laboratories for cultural and technical experimentation in place, questions arise regarding how and with what effects they come about, what they mean to those who partake and how they organize themselves in order to satisfy those involved. Recognizing the way that these spaces reach of alternative technologies and alternative ways of being we conceptualize them as materialized utopias, which are fragile socio-material arrangements. Rather than articulating grand utopian or ecotopian alternative societies, we look at materialized utopias as the gradual tweaking, probing and fixing of things. We elaborate on this with the study of …

Rituals Of Care: Reimagining Welfare, Meike Schalk, Sara Brolundde Carvalho

Nordes Conference Series

The legendary Swedish welfare state model comprised, on its smallest scale, an infrastructure of ‘common rooms’ (gemensamhetslokaler). Here, we explore common rooms as a spatio-social concept inspired by ‘the commons’. We argue that common rooms were fundamental to the Swedish welfare state model until the 1990s, and that the divorce of the spatial dimension from the social apparatus contributed to their decline. Using recent common rooms (Gemeinschaftsräume) in subsidized housing in Vienna as our empirical example, we illustrate how collectivity is influenced by changing legal frameworks, with common rooms receiving new attention in recent sustainable housing policies. On the micro …

Taking Positions: Institutions And Individuals In Public Sector Design, Maria Ferreira, Eeva Berglund

Nordes Conference Series

If recent decades have witnessed an expanded notion of design, here we explore such trends through the changing roles of public innovation labs and individuals within them. Recognizing the work of design scholarship in seeking to understand this influential and fast-changing field, we focus not so much on institutional form as on individuals doing design-led work in the public sector, whether or not they think of their work in terms of design. The paper draws on initial findings from ongoing work involving interviews and engagements with such labs in Latin America. We suggest approaching urban innovation labs with more attention …

Affective Infrastructuring, Alicia Smedberg

Nordes Conference Series

This paper discusses the implications of care within infrastructuring processes, through the lens of a case study account and anecdote. The case study, located in Malmö (Sweden), is an on-going project exploring methods for citizen engagement within city planning. The paper seeks to exemplify how affect can travel - and accumulate - in interactions between public sector workers and citizens, and how this affective current means that each actor is simultaneously affecting and being affected by her surroundings.

Why Care About Virtual Landscapes? Immersive Open World Gaming Related To Positive Health, Paul Roncken

Nordes Conference Series

For some reason many people enjoy, spend long hours and pay for being out on virtual fields, playing an avatar that needs to hunt, prey, hide, survive and interact with all kinds of programmed entities and online players. Surely the designers and programmers deserve praise for their efforts and achievements in yearly progress on more detailed and increasingly immersive virtual experiences. But does that suffice to care about virtual landscapes other than classifying them as artificial places for fun and diversion? In this paper I will make a first attempt to relate virtual landscape experiences to accumulated insights in environmental …

Navigating Care In Social Design: A Provisional Model, Eva Knutz, Thomas Markussen, Tau Lenskjold

Nordes Conference Series

The aim of this paper is to show how the value of social design lies in the approach’s ability as a caring practice to foster change for vulnerable groups in society. Yet, to achieve such change, social designers must have a navigational tool that allows them to identify and steer through some of the value conflicts that are typically involved in public service care provision. To substantiate this claim, we rapport from two recent social design projects in the public sector dealing with care within criminal justice and healthcare. Building on these two projects we propose a provisional model for …

Caring With Others – Cultivating And Revaluing As Forms Of Everyday Designing, Melisa Duque, Laura Popplow

Nordes Conference Series

In this paper we reflect on the notion of caring with in design research by discussing processes of cultivating and revaluing. Cultivating as a form of caring with other species. Revaluing as a form of caring with unwanted things. Both are addressed as everyday designing, ongoing liminal processes that have regenerative potential to revalue and care for/with dirty matters.

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 …

Caring For Diversity In Co-Design With Young Immigrants, Dagny Stuedahl, Henry Mainsah

Nordes Conference Series

This exploratory paper will ask questions about how we as co-designers and humanitarian designers engage with the outside and will especially be concerned with dialogues, interaction and knowledge production with young immigrants in co-design processes. We also will ask how we connect the questions arising from the histories of societies that participants bring into the co-design situation, how our practice and co-design understanding can handle cases where we cannot really grasp the complexity when religious, ethnical, personal and political experiences build the ground for collaborations. This becomes especially important in situations where complexity may ruin the co-design process and the …

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 …

Research Experiences Beyond The Comfort Zone, Juan Sanin

Nordes Conference Series

The intersection between design and care is shaping new design fields that are both promising and challenging. Design for healthcare is one of these fields: it brings opportunities for improving people’s experience of care through design research, but it takes designers out of their comfort zone. Scholars have reported success doing design for healthcare, but not much has been said about challenges, failures or confrontations found in this field. This paper argues that we should care more about discomforting aspects of design research to get a better understanding of what designing together involves. It presents a case of care (in)action …

Broadening Horizons Of Design Ethics? Importing Concepts From Applied Anthropology, Johanna Ylipulli, Aale Luusua

Nordes Conference Series

This paper is a thought experiment: we explore how certain ethical considerations of applied anthropology might contribute to the evolving body of work on design ethics. To begin to consider ethical analogies between these two fields, we first align them on a conceptual level by scrutinizing how they both change relationships. Further, we introduce three central concepts and related debates of applied anthropology that could supplement discussions on contemporary design ethics: beneficence, collaborative approach and advocacy. The authors are specialized in (design) anthropology, architecture and human-computer interaction (HCI); in this paper, we draw from our respective fields and backgrounds.

Design For Sustainable Entangled Human-Nature Systems, Emīlija Veselova

Nordes Conference Series

Humanity must rapidly transition towards sustainable futures. Reaching planetary sustainability requires care for nature and radical transformation of human-made systems. Human and natural systems co-exist in extensive, complex, multi-layered entanglement. Design for sustainability and, ultimately, all design, will need to be transformed towards design for sustainable entangled human-nature systems. This paper outlines six developments to support this transformation. It suggests that all design projects must (1) be viewed as interlinked to human-nature systems and their sustainability, (2) include natural systems and entities as key stakeholders, and (3) include transdisciplinary perspectives on the entangled systems and sustainability. Moreover, design could adopt …

Design For The Age Of Species – Exploring Ways For Designers To Care For Multispecies Coexistence, Petra Lilja

Nordes Conference Series

This paper presents the project The Age of Species (TAS) and the ‘multispecies approach’ addressing the who in care with the aim to disrupt human-centeredness and open up for reconfigurations of design practices to better engage with troubled presents where a myriad of other species is overlooked and becoming extinct. TAS invites designers and scientists to speculate of and design for anthropo-de-centric futures by thinking through care and coexistence. By describing and reflecting on the experiences of an initial workshop and its outcomes as well as anchoring it with theories within feminist posthumanism, the aim is to explore and define …

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

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 …

Waste, So What? A Reflection On Waste And The Role Of Designers In A Circular Economy, Holly Mcquillan

Nordes Conference Series

This paper discusses research currently being undertaken which addresses the interrelated volume, value and cost of waste and the responsibility designers have in its creation. The paper begins by outlining the contemporary waste problem (in the fashion industry). Then utilising observations made during recent field tests – where waste reduction and elimination strategies were applied to existing designs – the impact that explicit and implicit design hierarchies and complexity have on waste minimisation attempts are discussed. Questions such as: is waste a problem in the context of proposed Circular Economy models? After all, if we have a Circular Economy, then …

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 …

Caring Design Experiments In The Aftermath, Kristina Lindström, Åsa Ståhl

Nordes Conference Series

We live in the aftermath of industrial design, which primarily has been guided by a focus on making the new. Through the project Un/Making Soil Communities, carried out where glass production has left pollution in the soil, the authors propose caring design experiments which aim to foster maintenance and repair for livable worlds. In this articulation, the authors draw on democratic design experiments (Binder et al 2015), but propose a shift from gathering around matters-of-concern (Latour 2005) to matters-of-care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Furthermore, caring design experiments also entail engaging with big enough stories (Haraway 2016) through going visiting …

Thalassic: Women, Gender, And The Sublime In Relation To Marine Art, Kelsy Patnaude

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

The sea may be regarded as a source of tranquility as well as one of unsettling trepidation, ambiguous even in its representation. Those who are called to it must be relentless in the face of uncertainty; what awaits them is the immeasurable sublime. Defined in art as a reference to greatness beyond all possibility of control, the sublime invokes an urge to pursue pleasurable terror in the unmanageable. On heavily trafficked and dangerous seas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the strict gender hierarchy of authority on board ships in seafaring industries was solidified. Thus, the dominance of the male …

Measuring Up: A Case For Redrawing The System Boundaries Of Sustainability At The University Of Kentucky, Brent Sturlaugson, Rebekah Radtke, Anita Lee-Post

Architecture Faculty Publications

The primary goal of this paper is to examine the role that sustainability assessment and reporting plays in creating a sustainable campus for academic excellence. A prototype sustainability assessment and reporting system is developed for triple bottom line impact analysis of the built environment of the newly expanded and renovated Gatton College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky. The prototype system utilizes a toolkit to collect environmental, social, and economic data of the building's built environment for sustainable design performance analyses. The system also employs a comprehensive set of sustainability metrics to measure and report the building's …

Bridging Dimensions: A Robotic Art Project, Samantha Miller

Honors Theses

Spanning the divide between the humanities and STEM has been a pursuit of my undergraduate experience. In my senior project I seek to relate these disciplines through the creation of “automated canvases.” Resulting is a series of robotic art pieces that automate the opening and closing motion of Turkish map folds. These map folds then present a series of paintings displaying a tone of the uncanny and references to parallel universes. Utilizing robotics in my project allows the paintings to push further into a third dimension than normally possible. Providing literal motion to my traditionally two dimensional work requires consideration …

Barriers: An Exploration Of Architectural Structures As An Indication Of Wealth And Socioeconomic Status, Lisa Demoranville

Honors Theses

I decided to explore the barriers and limitations of wealth through an investigation of architectural structures, focusing on popular industries and institutions on which our society commonly depends. I have noticed that places such as hospitals, schools, grocery stores, and restaurants differ dramatically depending on the neighborhoods in which they were located. This topic sparked my interest after living in Lima, Peru for a month, as I was able to observe the developing economy and dramatic division of wealth among the population. Certain questions about the divides and differences within a society and its culture started crossing my mind; not …

Overstimulated - An Immersive, Multimedia Art Installation, Quinn Devlin

Honors Theses

This thesis provides the explanation, inspiration, research and progression of an immersive, multimedia art installation that emulates the idea of a “sexual dystopia.” It explores how our dichotomy of inadequate sex education and hypersexual, gender-based media is resulting in a dystopian sexual reality for women in particular. The work portrays a future world in which sexual and fertility technology is so advanced and accessible that real men and women no longer interact. As a result, women and objects become one in the same.

Female literary icons are over-sexualized to suggest that porn-culture is a by-product of a historical framework that …

Altered States: Creative Arts, Virtual Reality, And The Human Condition, Sophia Gebara

Honors Theses

Virtual reality (VR) is a medium that is cutting-edge and novel, creating fully immersive experiences for diverse audiences. Able to fabricate endless opportunities of hyper-realistic scenes, virtual reality provides a specific kind of space for self-reflection and empathy that no other medium can match. VR can take the viewer to the night of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, or next to families trying to survive the genocide in the Nuba mountains of Sudan, or even alongside a NASA scientists atop a sheet of ice in Greenland measuring the rising sea levels. This thesis explores the discourse and critical commentary surrounding …

Mes-Ti-Zo, Aeleen Jacinto

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Meztiso is an exploration of the artist’s identity as an individual born and raised in Guatemala; which is a country rich in natural resources where the majority of the population is native Maya yet the ruling class is majority white and poverty is widespread. The artist takes on this stunning contradiction using her own influences and views which were shaped by the political and economic upheaval and instability of her youth in Guatemala. The artist comments on her own identity as a person of mixed ancestry, a Meztiso, and because of her own family’s involvement in the capitalist government that …