Entire DC Network | Open Access Articles | Digital Commons Network™

Practice Research In Social Design As A Form Of Inquiry, Patrycja Kaszynska, Eva Knutz, Thomas Markussen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The chairs' editorial introducing the theme track 'Practice research in social design as a form of inquiry'.

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Doing And Undoing Post-Anthropocentric Design, Li Jönsson, Martín Tironi, Pablo Hermansen, Alex Wilkie

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The chairs' introductory editorial for the theme track 'Doing and Undoing Post-Anthropocentric Design'.

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Designing New Financial Transactions: Theories, Case Studies, Methods, Practice And Futures, Chris Elsden, Inte Gloerich, Bettina Nissen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Talking about money can be difficult; designing with it, harder still. Though design is increasingly ‘value-centred’, this theme-track proposes the need for critical attention to how we actually represent, transact and exchange what we value. In this editorial, we offer some background to the topic, describe potential areas of development for design researchers and practitioners, and introduce the papers presented through this theme at DRS 2022.

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Biodesign For A Culture Of Life: Of Microbes, Ethics, And Design, Rachel Armstrong

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Scientific advances at the turn of the new millennium brought radical new insights into just how microbial our world is and the extent to which microbes influence our lives: from notions of the body (human microbiome); to their distribution in our living spaces (microbiome of the built environment); playing an integral role in ecosystems services in our cities (urban microbiome) and are fundamental to biogeochemical cycles—our world is irreducibly microbial. This paper asks what it means to dwell and design in such times and proposes an ethics for biodesign: which employs the insights and tools of the biotechnological age to …

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Pushing Divergence And Promoting Convergence In A Speculative Design Process: Considerations On The Role Of Ai As A Co-Creation Partner, Luca Simeone, Riccardo Mantelli, Alfredo Adamo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Within design research, several studies have looked at Artificial Intelligence as a tool to help ideation processes. However, the potential of using Artificial Intelligence to support a specific characteristic of the design process, namely the interplay between divergent and convergent thinking, remains underexplored. Aiming to address this gap, this paper examines how 136 students interacted with Artificial Intelligence on the occasion of two courses run by the authors in a prominent European design school.

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Design Thinking Community Health & Well-Being: Creating With And For Community Capacities, Danielle Lake, Phillip Motley, Megan Casner, Kathleen Flannery

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper shares initial findings from an ongoing study assessing the value and limitations of a two-year community-engaged design thinking initiative intended to foster more inclusive and holistic public health community-based innovations with underserved communities across one county in the southeast U.S. The initiative hopes to institutionalize and socialize community-based design within a public health framework and build organizational and individual capacities. Initial findings indicate that participants find value in design thinking tools and processes, and that such processes have transformed mental models, fostered relationships, and built skills for participants' professional, civic, and personal lives. Findings also surfaced challenges related …

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Repair As A Social Design Practice: Three Case Studies In Vulnerable Households In Chile, Pedro Alvarez Caselli, Antonio Batlle Lathrop

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The work presented herein addresses the socio-material implications and spontaneous design actions that emerge from the home repair practices of household objects in low-income areas. Through qualitative research and contextual inquiry from the investigation of their praxis (Cross, 2007), we reassess the principles of planned obsolescence associated with product design and throw-away culture. Within the framework of matters of care of non-human devices that are part of a social assembly, a theoretical discussion develops around certain actions; in particular, repairing everyday household objects, as design solutions. The exploratory methodology of this project is based on literature review and on-site case …

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Design As Posture: Developing Enlightened Subjectivity With The Philosophy Of Yoga, Estelle Berger

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This research aims at supporting designers in developing a both embodied and reflective posture in practice – referred to as “enlightened subjectivity”. A dialogue is set up between the Samkhya, an early Buddhist philosophy at the basis of Yoga, and the design discipline. Grounded in practical experience, this inspirational framework allows approaching the sense-making process occurring in practice, through perception, understanding, action, and relation. This is sustained by professional posture, the specific way in which one invests their activity, giving it substance, meaning and justification. Implications for design education relate to increasing awareness among designers on their own posture, and …

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Critical Pedagogy And The Pluriversal Design Studio, Colin M. Gray

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Studio learning is central to the teaching of design. However, the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside emerging and historic critiques of studio ped-agogy, creates a space for critical engagement with the present and potential futures of design education in studio. In this paper, I outline historic critiques of studio pedagogy, drawing primarily from critical pedagogy literature to frame is-sues relating to disempowerment, student agency, and monolithic representa-tions of the student role and student development. I build upon this critical foundation to reimagine studio practices as pluriversal, recognizing the challeng-es and opportunities of bridging epistemological differences and facilitating the potential …

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Living With Living Artefacts: Six Concepts For Designing User Acceptance Of Living Artefacts, Simone Van Den Broek, Alwin De Rooij, Michel Van Dartel

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Bio-designers are exploring how living organisms can become vital aspects of the design and use of an artefact. These new living artefacts have qualities, needs, design opportunities and relationships with the user that differ from nonliving artefacts. To design for user acceptance of living artefacts into daily life, designers must develop an understanding for why a user wishes to live with living artefacts. This starts with an understanding of why humans have been living with other living beings throughout history. These reasons have been examined through a semi-systematic review of literature across diverse research fields. Qualitative thematic analysis suggests that …

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Legal Design Could And Should Be More Sociolegal, Amanda Perry-Kessaris

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Legal design could and should be more sociolegal. Sociolegal research can offer conceptual frameworks, empirical methods and data, and normative direction to legal design. At the same time, designerly methods can enhance the abilities of sociolegal researchers to make and communicate sense of things to, with and for themselves, academics in other disciplines, and the wider world. So, if legal designers were to engage more deeply and systematically with sociolegal research and researchers, benefits could flow to legal design, to cross-disciplinary research and to the wider world.

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Introducing The Play Activity Wheel: Designing Social, Physical And Playful Learning Activities From Digital Game Universes, Vici Daphne Händel, Erik Ottar Jensen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This article introduces and describes the play activity wheel, developed by the authors. It was created through looking back at 19 years of personal experiences of transform-ing television shows, board games and digital games into pedagogical activities, and has a focus on social, physical and playful learning. The idea of developing computer games, television series and board games into physical activities arose from observing children’s interests in transforming these universes into games and activities. The play activity wheel was developed in various settings with different participants, such as children aged 1–15, students in higher education, educators, researchers and other stakeholders. …

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Anatomy Of A “Technology”: Proposing A Meta-Design Framework For Sustainability Literacy That Addresses The Issue Of Efficacy In Modern Socio-Technical Cultures, Nicole Sacchetti

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In the era of the Anthropocene, where the climate crisis forces humankind to rethink its values and systems of production, sustainability literacy becomes crucial for any design practitioner. This paper aims to contribute to the extensive literature that regards meta-design as a reflexive practice for the study of design purposes, processes, methods, and outputs by outlining a meta-design framework to tackle the modern artificial environments in which humankind has become naturalized. Specifically, by inscribing modern “technologies” within Simondon’s concept of “technical object”, it delineates the preliminary guidelines of a research approach for design education that, drawing from Lemonnier’s chaîne opératoire …

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Design For Public Policy: Embracing Uncertainty And Hybridity In Mapping Future Research, Lucy Kimbell, Liz Richardson, Ramia Mazé, Catherine Durose

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Addressing contemporary public policy challenges requires new thinking and new practice. Therefore, there is a renewed sense of urgency to critically assess the potential of the emerging field of ‘design for policy’. On the one hand, design approaches are seen as bringing new capacities for problem-solving to public policy development. On the other, the attendant risks posed to effective and democratic policy making are unclear, partly because of a limited evidence base. The paper synthesises recent contributions in design research, policy studies, political science and democratic theory which have examined the uses of design for public policy making. Mapping out …

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‘Making The Dust Fly’: (A Case Study Of) Design Research Promoting Health And Sustainability In Addressing Household Infections, Emmanuel Tsekleves, Collins Ahorlu, Andy Darby, Roger Pickup, Dziedzom De Souza, Daniel Boakye

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Global health crisis, such as antimicrobial resistance, threaten planetary health, as they have a direct impact on the environment, as well as to humans and animals. Personal and environmental hygiene form the best and most natural ways of reducing home infections and hence the need to take antibiotics. Despite this our understanding of cleaning in the home and interventions on home cleaning are limited. In this paper we present a project, which combined design research with environmental microbiology, to address this issue and to co-design sustainable cleaning interventions for human and planetary health. We focus on the design of a …

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Why Would I Ever Fry And Eat My Scoby? It Would Be Like Murder! Attuning To Nonhumans Through Kombucha Fermentation Practices, Aybars Senyildiz, Emilija Veselova

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Kombucha fermentation is a multispecies activity guided by human-microbe interactions. This study investigates kombucha fermentation practices as a platform to recognize relationality with nonhuman microbes. For this, relational theories enable reframing human-microbe relations by focusing on reciprocity and interconnectedness within multispecies relations. The empirical research consists of interviews, a design probing task, and a collective reflection workshop with kombucha brewers. The empirical research delivers insights into the agency of microbes, sensory experiences, and embodied knowledge in kombucha fermentation practices. Findings investigate how humans attune to the needs of microbes, and the role of embeddedness in ethical doings. In this way, …

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Designing And Worlding: Prototyping Equivocal Encounters, Pablo Hermansen, Martín Tironi

DRS Biennial Conference Series

To sustainably coexist with other ontologies, human beings must overcome the perception of being the center of the world. This article describes how a video log refuted the initial – anthropocentric – hypothesis explaining the breakdown of an experiment with Judy and Gombe, chimpanzees that inhabit the National Zoo of Chile. This shows that it is wrong to ascribe human affects and reactions to other ontologies, and also that there is a long way to go to apprehend, comprehend, and sustainable coexist with other ontologies in more-than-human ecosystems.

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Differential Moral Framing And The Design Imagination, Philippe Gauthier, Sébastien Proulx

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The objective of this paper is to provide a proof of concept for a pedagogical apparatus aiming to foster moral education and reflection about the inner good of their practice among apprentice-designers. We designed this tool with the aim of helping students understand how modern moral pluralism imprints professional mores, and how particular conceptions of the good life may affect the way they envision and devise how the world should be (and how they ought to design it). Our tool comes in the form of a role-playing game based on different species of worth coexisting in modern democracies, and that …

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Internship As A Child: What Designers Can Learn Through Play With Children, Karen Feder

DRS Biennial Conference Series

When designing for children’s play, designers need to understand the people and the context for which they are designing. This paper studies what designers can learn through play when completing an internship as a child, meaning spending time with children in their everyday lives without a predefined agenda. The data material involves reflective letters written by former design students who participated in an internship four years ago, as part of a Master’s course in child-centred design for play. The analysis of the letters shows how designers learn about play, children, designers, the method, and reflection when doing an in-ternship as …

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Making-With The Environment Through More-Than-Human Design, Berilsu Tarcan, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Ferne Edwards

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Current climate and ecological crises require questioning currently dominant under-standings and relations to nonhumans. While design is a human-centered field and practice, many intruders or competing theories challenge human-centered ap-proaches and propose ways to include nonhumans in design. This article explores different perspectives for post-anthropocentric design approaches and focuses on how design can approach the notion more-than-human as an intruder to human-centered design. Proposing practice-based studies of making-with the environment as an alternative to human-centered design, it explores how to design beyond ideas of “human progress”. Firstly, more-than-human and related concepts are introduced. Secondly, how human-centered design can be challenged …

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After Practice: Messy Relations In The Ethnographic Study Of Design, Arlene Oak, Claire Nicholas

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The Thinking While Doing (TWD) project was an ambitious “research-creation” project that involved the designing and building of several full scale, “real” structures by architecture students and professors in “design-build” education. The grant also included two ethnographers (as well as scholars from the humanities). Together the participants in TWD were engaged in intersecting and distinct modes of research, ranging from architecture practice to philosophical reflections. While there were intentions for the insights of the ethnographers to ex-tend and inform knowledge of practice, as the TWD structures were created, it became evident that undertaking ethnography coincident with designing and building was …

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Reframing Advanced Manufacturing Ontologies Through An Exploration Of Ductus, Lewis Urquhart, Andrew Wodehouse

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Ontologies of manufacturing and making have received closer attention in recent years thanks to a renewed interest in materiality and questions of form-emergence and form perception. This work argues that the hylomorphic ontologies dominant within advanced manufacturing can be challenged through the introduction of a “ductus” concept, which relates to the traces left by unique material interactions and energy transferences as artefacts are fabricated. Drawing on multiple strands of scholarship, this paper develops a new ontological model integrating material-process relationships and end user experiences with the ductus of the making process at its core. This model is illustrated and elucidated, …

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Improvisational Design Dialogue: Exploring Relational Design Encounters As Means To Dismantle Oppression In Design, Brendon Clark, Nicholas B. Torretta

DRS Biennial Conference Series

To explore dismantling oppressive power relations in design, we bring to fore design encounters through the lens of relationality and improvisational competence. This paper is based on the premise that, if we are to move toward decolonizing design, design(ers) needs to re-think the organization of the design encounter and how we as designers practice participation in such encounters. We emphasize the improvisational nature of turn-taking in dialogue amidst asymmetric and dynamic power relations, with design’s commitment to generating resources for future practices, and decolonization’s commitment to re-configure power structures. After problematizing the design encounter from a power relation perspective, we …

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James V Birnmann: The Potential Of Critical Design For Examining Legal Issues, Phoebe Walton

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The current approach of legal design is solution-driven, with design considered a series of methodological steps used to improve existing legal systems. Such an approach fails to address systemic problems within these systems, and can instead exacerbate such issues. So far, there has been insufficient examination into the kinds of design used in conjunction with legal problems. This paper considers the potential of critical design to challenge more fundamental issues than those currently addressed with legal design. Through the project ‘James v Birnmann’, the paper illustrates how critical design can widen the discussion around legal issues, challenging the public’s perception …

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Storing Cultural Archives In Synthetic Dna: An Integrated Prospective Design Investigation, Emily Groves, Romain Talou, Andrea Schneider, Nicolas Henchoz

DRS Biennial Conference Series

As cultural institutions digitize their archives, they become more accessible and versatile. However, there are significant economic and environmental costs to maintaining large databases over time. Synthetic DNA is an emerging technology that can store data at high density, with almost no energy, for thousands of years. Yet, as technical advances bring DNA storage closer to everyday use, little has been done to understand how we will interact with the technology and accept it into society. We developed an integrated prospective design approach to investigate these challenges. This included participative workshops, narrative building and the design of three tangible DNA …

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Crafting In The Backstage: Materiality And The Changing Work Of Designers, Natalja Laurey, Marleen Huysman, Maura Soekijad

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Drawing on Goffman’s metaphor of frontstage and backstage, this article analyses the role of materiality in day-to-day work practices of craftspersons. The study is based on an ethnographic study of 17 months at a design firm which was amid a shift from product to service design. This means that instead of tangible products, the designers at the firm created intangible services. This shift in work practices reduced crafting to making visualizations for reports and presentations. As a response, the designers sought ways to spend more time on manually crafting in their work. In the backstage, when among trusted peers and …

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Infrastructuring The Foundations For A Service-Dominant Orientation, Lourenço Viana

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design has been identified as a transformational approach to help organisations build capabilities to become customer-centred and adopt a Service-Dominant Orientation. However, there’s a need to study how to develop the enabling structures that support and sustain these capabilities in time and at scale. This study explores how transformational work developed at a large international retailer helped develop the enabling structures that support these organisational level capabilities. The concept “infrastructuring” is proposed as a valid construct to analyse the ongoing strategic design work done to support the adoption of new practices and tools that will shape a new organisational logic …

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Augmented: Design And Ethnography In/Of An Architecture, Computer Science, And Textile Research-Creative Collective, Claire Nicholas, James Forren, Derek Reilly

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper introduces a multi-disciplinary research-creation project that examines the embodied and social nature of textile design and making at different structural scales – from beaded accessories to architectural components. Bringing together anthropology, architecture, computer science, and textile craft, “Gesture and Form” seeks to develop effective and ethical pedagogies for teaching design and handcraft with new materials and technologies. Specifically, the project explores the potentialities and limitations of a head-worn augmented reality (AR) system that documents, encodes, and later guides making practices. The discussion first introduces different disciplinary frameworks for understanding and researching embodied knowledge, before sketching the multi-disciplinary research …

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Can Ritual Experience Be The Jam To Stick Consumers And Service Provider? The Case Study Of Ritual Experience In Disney Experience As Service Design Application, Derrick Yang, Tseng-Ping Chiu, Min-Yuan Ma

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Service design has dominated the marketing strategies in recent years. This study proposes a conventional ritual sandwich model that explores the ritual patterns hidden in service and the intermediate interaction between consumer and industry, enhancing user engagement and long-term recurring consumption. The study took Disneyland as an example and extracted the interaction model between consumers and industry, further interviewed for preliminary verification, found out that the core value of ritual experience is generating unique meaning to consumers through experience the script provided by the service provider, further transform to the internal trigger and participatory motivation into the next cycle. Hoped …

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Food’S Urban Graphic Heritage In Walthamstow, Robert Harland, Alison Barnes

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Food’s material and symbolic values are central to cultural heritage. Urban foodscapes are dense in graphic communication, with memories and meanings that connect us with place often triggered by food’s ‘graphic heritage’, for example, through fascia signs, packaging, branding, patterns, and lettering. This paper’s focus is on everyday grass roots manifestations of food’s graphic heritage within urban settings. It introduces and argues that food’s urban graphic heritage ‘speaks’ differently to diverse individuals and communities, inviting different interpretations that play a part in the development of place attachment and social interaction. The paper also proposes methods for the recording and analysis …

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Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

Practice Research In Social Design As A Form Of Inquiry, Patrycja Kaszynska, Eva Knutz, Thomas Markussen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Doing And Undoing Post-Anthropocentric Design, Li Jönsson, Martín Tironi, Pablo Hermansen, Alex Wilkie

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Designing New Financial Transactions: Theories, Case Studies, Methods, Practice And Futures, Chris Elsden, Inte Gloerich, Bettina Nissen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Biodesign For A Culture Of Life: Of Microbes, Ethics, And Design, Rachel Armstrong

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Pushing Divergence And Promoting Convergence In A Speculative Design Process: Considerations On The Role Of Ai As A Co-Creation Partner, Luca Simeone, Riccardo Mantelli, Alfredo Adamo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design Thinking Community Health & Well-Being: Creating With And For Community Capacities, Danielle Lake, Phillip Motley, Megan Casner, Kathleen Flannery

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Repair As A Social Design Practice: Three Case Studies In Vulnerable Households In Chile, Pedro Alvarez Caselli, Antonio Batlle Lathrop

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design As Posture: Developing Enlightened Subjectivity With The Philosophy Of Yoga, Estelle Berger

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Critical Pedagogy And The Pluriversal Design Studio, Colin M. Gray

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Living With Living Artefacts: Six Concepts For Designing User Acceptance Of Living Artefacts, Simone Van Den Broek, Alwin De Rooij, Michel Van Dartel

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Legal Design Could And Should Be More Sociolegal, Amanda Perry-Kessaris

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Introducing The Play Activity Wheel: Designing Social, Physical And Playful Learning Activities From Digital Game Universes, Vici Daphne Händel, Erik Ottar Jensen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Anatomy Of A “Technology”: Proposing A Meta-Design Framework For Sustainability Literacy That Addresses The Issue Of Efficacy In Modern Socio-Technical Cultures, Nicole Sacchetti

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Design For Public Policy: Embracing Uncertainty And Hybridity In Mapping Future Research, Lucy Kimbell, Liz Richardson, Ramia Mazé, Catherine Durose

DRS Biennial Conference Series

‘Making The Dust Fly’: (A Case Study Of) Design Research Promoting Health And Sustainability In Addressing Household Infections, Emmanuel Tsekleves, Collins Ahorlu, Andy Darby, Roger Pickup, Dziedzom De Souza, Daniel Boakye

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Why Would I Ever Fry And Eat My Scoby? It Would Be Like Murder! Attuning To Nonhumans Through Kombucha Fermentation Practices, Aybars Senyildiz, Emilija Veselova

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Designing And Worlding: Prototyping Equivocal Encounters, Pablo Hermansen, Martín Tironi

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Differential Moral Framing And The Design Imagination, Philippe Gauthier, Sébastien Proulx

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Internship As A Child: What Designers Can Learn Through Play With Children, Karen Feder

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Making-With The Environment Through More-Than-Human Design, Berilsu Tarcan, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Ferne Edwards

DRS Biennial Conference Series

After Practice: Messy Relations In The Ethnographic Study Of Design, Arlene Oak, Claire Nicholas

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Reframing Advanced Manufacturing Ontologies Through An Exploration Of Ductus, Lewis Urquhart, Andrew Wodehouse

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Improvisational Design Dialogue: Exploring Relational Design Encounters As Means To Dismantle Oppression In Design, Brendon Clark, Nicholas B. Torretta

DRS Biennial Conference Series

James V Birnmann: The Potential Of Critical Design For Examining Legal Issues, Phoebe Walton

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Storing Cultural Archives In Synthetic Dna: An Integrated Prospective Design Investigation, Emily Groves, Romain Talou, Andrea Schneider, Nicolas Henchoz

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Crafting In The Backstage: Materiality And The Changing Work Of Designers, Natalja Laurey, Marleen Huysman, Maura Soekijad

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Infrastructuring The Foundations For A Service-Dominant Orientation, Lourenço Viana

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Augmented: Design And Ethnography In/Of An Architecture, Computer Science, And Textile Research-Creative Collective, Claire Nicholas, James Forren, Derek Reilly

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Can Ritual Experience Be The Jam To Stick Consumers And Service Provider? The Case Study Of Ritual Experience In Disney Experience As Service Design Application, Derrick Yang, Tseng-Ping Chiu, Min-Yuan Ma

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Food’S Urban Graphic Heritage In Walthamstow, Robert Harland, Alison Barnes

DRS Biennial Conference Series