/// WEEK 13 /// Design Research Conference in Umea, Sweden.
I am invited as panel speaker by the fine people at Culture Lab in Newcastle to an exciting conference, organised by the Design Research Society. The conference will be concerned with Design's Big Debates, to stimulate fresh views and discussion on future directions for design research.
Taking place at Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden, the city seems somewhat representative for a fresh re-visit: Umea is European Capital of Culture 2014 and disperses a bursting creative spirit, combined with a poetic nordic twist.
The panel is aimed at discussing "Design for Dialogue" and how sense- making of diverse voices and technological imaginaries are relating to a dialogical design approach.
Or to quote the organisers "Over the last decade, design processes have come to prominence as a way of integrating knowledge in complex domains and communicating the potential implications of ineffable new ideas and technologies. For the public, emerging technologies such as synthetic biology, nano-engineering, and smart cities may be hard to relate to as they develop. As such, designerly explorations may support non-experts to engage with the implications of emerging technologies in ways that are meaningful to their everyday lives. And for technology researchers, the increased ‘radical interdisciplinarity’ of such research and development may present complex challenges for collaboration in project teams which draw together diverse expertise. As such, design may serve a role in knowledge integration."
And:
"This proposed conversation addresses this potential for design. It speaks to the growing discourse on the significance of design practice and artefacts in making emerging technology research intelligible and accessible to broad audiences and interdisciplinary teams, whether in terms of potential applications, user experience, public engagement, or other forms of sense making. It also speaks to current conceptual explorations of what it means to do ‘research through design’ and what the research contribution of design could be, what roles designers could adopt in research, and how design practice and artefacts could serve to produce knowledge. Such explorations foreground rich opportunities for design as a form of inquiry, to foster dialogue in complex technological landscapes."
The panel format is hereby part of the re-consideration on how discourse and discussion can take place and one idea we are pursuing, involves a stimulated discussion before the actual conference takes place. We are currently building up responses to the organisers' proposition by providing a reflecting on a design artefact, an outcomes, process, roles or practice, accompanied by a textual response. Such reflection aims to introduce each other's perspective as well as "seeding provocation", which will also help the conference delegates to prepare more specific, more concise questions when attending the actual panel discussion.
The panel speakers act hereby as "catalysts", bringing each different experiences of design research to the table:
— Thomas Binder, Associate Professor, The Danish Design School, Copenhagen
— Tobie Kerridge, Lecturer in Design and Research Fellow, Goldsmiths College, University of London
— Bas Raijmakers, Director, STBY, Amsterdam/London
— Veronica Ranner, Designer and Researcher, Royal College of Art, London
— Tim Regan, Senior Research Software Development Engineer, Socio-Digital Systems (SDS), Microsoft Research Cambridge
Us catalysts will adopt the role of a discussant, stating our reflected perspective in relation to a chosen design artefact (outcome/process etc.) to the panel and audience. At the conference site a "provocation box" will allow delegates to introduce their perspective alongside us catalysts. Simultaneously, a series of Twitter chats will be run by the organisers (#designfordialogue) — the Twitter log of conversation threads promises an exciting and active discussion: The chairs will draw upon the threads to provoke real- time responses from the catalysts during the session.
Although acknowledging multiple trajectories for dialogical design, I am personally eager for its immediate potential for change: industrial manufacturing society came seemingly to an end about 50 years ago, alongside with its rules and its focus on production, materiality and output in quantity. Since then the transition to a knowledge/information society has been a fairly riddled one — the digital revolution manifests itself mainly in electronic bodies, in "big data" and "always on" culture, pressuring individuals to seek for orientation, focus and clarity in their (work)lives. Designers in the traditional sense are now challenged to critically examine their role, to get an understanding how their personal actions have consequences on a much wider scale.
Initially, the shift from industrial society to information society envisioned a world much smarter, cleaner and less noisy, but had created an increasing complex world instead that didn't even challenge its old paradigms: The new world didn't invent a new one, it only copied the already existing. By building ever faster computers that accelerate the production of data, people began to confuse data with "information". The digital turn is – sadly – still stuck in carbon based economies, expelling new machines, and in consequence, exhausts of data.
Biomaterials have the capacity to destabilise such pattern and the material offspring of digitality, as second order consequence in a designed transmission chain. Materials of organic origin might appear in stark contrast to our current understanding of electronics as "digital enablers", but will eventually allow for entirely novel technology paradigms, shifting in consequence our understanding of knowledge construction, spatial experience and selfhood.
The information society has just begun to acknowledge that the designer's role might not be anymore about designing top-down spaces for work and products for knowledge "mining". Instead, the designer of the future might be much more concerned with understanding and interpreting spaces and infrastructures, conversely illustrating responsive systemic effect as part of a larger interconnected network.
I am already looking forward to develop the dialogue over the next few weeks with my fellow panel speakers as collective experiment to demonstrate the beneficial effect of dialogical exchange.