Art and Design Commons^™

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 …

From “Bugs” To Exploratory Exhibition Design – Transforming Design Flaws In Users’ Experiences, Kristina Maria Madsen, Peter Vistisen

Nordes Conference Series

In this paper we explore the potentials in observing how users creatively explore or hack an exhibition design and transform or scale these “abnormalities” in the users microinteractions into new explorative exhibition designs. Can we apply this notion of observing exploring user interactions and transform these microinteraction into drivers for user experience based on strategies of emergent gameplay? If we acknowledge these findings from the design process as potential enablers of superior user experiences for the end-user, and not simply as ‘bugs’ and ‘anomalies’ to be avoided or ‘patched’, there is a potential for scaling, transferring, and transforming new insights …

The Design Fiction Matrix— A Synthesis Tool For Grounding Fiction Scenarios In Real Facts, Peter Vistisen

Nordes Conference Series

This explorative paper presents a didactic synthesis tool to support designers and design students in adopting design fiction as a method for speculative design. We present the theoretical underpinnings behind the development of the framework and the logic of the tool itself while situating the tool among the current discourse on design fiction. Finally, we present a series of reflections upon the recent year’s application of the tool in a design educational setting, showing the different ways the tool can be applied and represented in practice.

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.

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.

Cocoon – Conceptualisation Of A Virtual Membrane In The Current Transition Towards More-Than-Human Design, Cornelia Hulling, Jan Von Loeper, Swathi Swathi Swathi, Yanyi Lu

Nordes Conference Series

Through the COVID-19 pandemic, existing sociotechnical work phenomena are revealed and magnified. With the help of a design case, this paper discusses where the Human-Centred Design (HCD) paradigm meets boundaries, asking to expand and shift towards More-Than-Human Design. The case at hand presents the metaphor ‘Cocoon’, furthermore allowing to speculate on the broader concept of ‘virtual membrane’. Recontextualising the case from the scales of workspheres and from user–tool towards human– nonhuman relations, we critique and discuss the socio-technical implications of HCD.

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 …

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.

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 …

Tangled Becomings In Materialities Of Felt Practice(S), Bilge Merve Aktaş, Julia Valle Noronha

Nordes Conference Series

In this exploratory paper, we discuss how different scales of production can affect relationships between humans and nonhumans. This discussion is carried out through the exploration of three scales of felting: hand-felting with manual tools, felting with semi-industrial tools at small-scale studios, and felting with industrial automated machines. Despite the large spectrum from hand production to industrial production and the dramatic change in the actual practices involved, the fundamentals of felting remain similar, creating a compound surface by pressing and unifying fibres. By examining these changes, this paper explores the fluidity and changing meanings of practices and their impact on …

Micro-Scale Curriculum Development In Design For Sustainability Education, Karen Marie Hasling, Louise Ravnløkke

Nordes Conference Series

This paper explores and discuss how formalised learning activities, inspired by design methods, can be used as a pedagogic means to support transformative learning in design for sustainability education. The paper departs from the experience that formal efforts with strengthening sustainability in design education are often focusing on macro-level curriculum development; on the progression of courses based on learning objectives and goals and less on what we call micro-level curriculum development, being the actual learning activities constituting a course. In the paper, we introduce a template for formalising learning activities, we present concrete learning activities developed in the context of …

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 …

Capturing Scales Of Institutioning, Harriet Simms

Nordes Conference Series

The concept of Institutioning (Huybrechts, Benesch and Geib, 2017) calls for Participatory Designers (PD) to not only focus on the micro-level impact of their work, but to also understand how the institutions they are connected to are involved and impacted. This paper explores this concept within a Higher Education Institution (HEI) and local neighbourhood context, using two methods of analysis to draw out insights around the dependencies and impact of the institution. Firstly using Situational Analysis (Clarke, 2005), the context is captured at a meso-level at each stage of engagement revealing insights into the impact of PD methods. The dependencies …

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. …

Appropriating A Dbr Model For A ‘Research Through Codesign’ Project On Play In Schools - To Frame Participation, Hanne Hede Jørgensen, Helle Marie Skovbjerg, Mette Agger Eriksen

Nordes Conference Series

On the basis of an ongoing research project on designing play in schools, the aim of this paper is to explore how a fruitful combination of designbased research (DBR) and research-through-design (RtD) can enrich both research strategies. Through a number of examples of codesign processes with pedagogues, the paper explores how it is possible practically to communicate, reflect and frame participation inside, outside and beyond research through a codesign project. By exploring ways of participation within situated pedagogical practices and ongoing experiments, the paper unfolds ways for researcher and stakeholders to exchange and challenge worldviews and everyday practices. The main …

Re-Thinking Pedagogy And Dis-Embodied Interaction For Online Learning And Co-Design, Salu Ylirisku, Giyong Jang, Nitin Sawhney

Nordes Conference Series

Online courses are a key means for universities to scale up their educational offerings to wider audiences. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic worsened, many such courses that were initially designed to be given in-person, were pushed online. Instructors and their respective institutions, however, had limited knowledge of processes, practices, and tools to design high-quality learning experiences. This paper collects faculty and student experiences from a Nordic university and outlines key challenges for designing high-quality live online learning sessions. It demonstrates that, given the fundamentally different contexts for learning in digital settings, teachers need to rethink their understanding of what …

Scaling Experiments In Urban Space – An Exploratory Framework, Eva Knutz, Kathrina Dankl

Nordes Conference Series

In this article, we outline an exploratory framework that attempts to capture different types of scaling practices in urban space. "Scaling" in this context is understood as a concept that involves a temporary intervention in public space that negotiates agency among human and nonhuman actors. The aim of this framework is to assist curators and researchers in conceptualizing site-specific interventions or exhibitions in urban contexts.

Closer To Earth: Scales Of Planning For Urban Waters, Kristine Holten-Andersen

Nordes Conference Series

Climatic changes of waterbodies calls for new scales and approaches to planning of urban surface waters. Learning from a real-time case of planning practice, I display and discuss how limitations of sectorial logics, operational scales and schemes of planning, in addition to inherent epistemological prisons of dominant dichotomies, are obstacles of an actual reorientation of planning practice. On this background, I call upon further research – of a designerly and transformative kind, to explore novel approaches to municipal planning of surface waters. I speculate how this could evolve around a multidisciplinary rubber-boot approach with landscape architects performing as Sherpas, process …

Tracing Matters Of Scale By Walking With Minerals, Petra Lilja

Nordes Conference Series

Most practices of design are dependent on materials, and an anthropocentric way of thinking matter as mere resource ready to exploit, dominates. This text attempts to counteract that mode of thinking about matter, by walking and thinking-with stones, minerals and fossils in a disused limestone quarry in southern Sweden. The text is folding together thoughts from philosophy of science and vital materialism with insights from the lithic, spatio-temporal scales of sedimented fossil archives of the quarry and situated experiential explorations taking place there. What emerged from the learnings of the minerals, and what this text contributes with, is a proposal …

Distributed Thinking Through Making: Towards A Relational Ontology In Practice-Led Design Research, Luis Vega

Nordes Conference Series

Practice-led design research is a celebrated but debated field of inquiry. Although it offers appropriate tools to advance design knowledge through and within making, its scope remains limited to the scale of individual practice. Such a limitation hinders the possibility to account for particular design instances in relation to more general contexts. To address this issue, the paper at hand presents an exploratory literature review discussing why practice-led design research may benefit from adopting a relational ontology—i.e., a stance wherein to be is to relate. The review identifies two streams of relational thinking that exhibit potential overlaps with practice-led design …

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 …

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 …

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 …

(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 …

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 …

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 …

Teaching Size, Area And Scale, Ingri Strand, Eva Lutnæs

Nordes Conference Series

Gaining an understanding of scale, area and size is an important part of the subject of Art and crafts. Although this skill should be practiced, perhaps even mastered, by pupils in primary education, it is regarded as difficult to teach, due to the skill being intangible and difficult to discuss. This paper seeks to aid in overcoming these difficulties, as it gathers initial findings from ongoing interviews with teachers on their strategies for teaching this important skill. Instead of highlighting one strategy as the best, we wish to showcase a broad range of appropriate approaches to this theme. Tensions between …

Design For Noticing With Biodiversity Logbooks, Liz Edwards, Serena Pollastri, Linda Linda Linda, Robert Barratt

Nordes Conference Series

This paper introduces the use of design to improve noticing skills in order to address environmental issues at a variety of physical and temporal scales. We illustrate the application of ‘design for noticing’ through Biodiversity Logbooks – a pilot project intended to reduce ‘plant blindness’ amongst primary school children. Plant blindness is the inability to recognise, appreciate and value plants and it has far reaching social, environmental and economic implications. In this project, we designed pedagogical tools and processes to foster the skills of noticing plants in their environments, and connecting the small-scale of their individual features to large-scale systems. …

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, …

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 …