Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

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

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 …

Proceedings Of Nordes 2021: Matters Of Scale, Eva Brandt, Thomas Markussen, Eeva Berglund, Guy Julier, Per Linde

DRS Conference Volumes

This volume is the proceedings of the 9th biennial Nordes conference, hosted by Design School Kolding and the University of Southern Denmark, 15 – 18 August 2021. All contributions relate in different ways to the overall theme, ‘Matters of Scale’.

Designers are often invited to upscale their efforts to help solve the big challenges facing our societies and the planet. But just as often, the idea of upscaling is met with a critical requirement to evaluate, document and account for design-initiated change. Otherwise, the idea easily ends up representing “the overblown claims”, as Geoff Mulgan once called them, that unfortunately …