Design & Democracy

The Design Journal, 2017

In this paper, we reflect on design as a field that is currently in the process of re-evaluating its political agency. Generally, the political dimensions of design are reflected upon thoroughly and are under continual development, however, this paper describes a break in today's discourse about design as a political actor: While historically designers have attempted to induce social change by designing objects, today (social) design understands itself as a change agent in a much more direct relation to the social. Reflecting on possible implications, we identify the need to re-evaluate and differentiate our understanding of design's roles to productively deal with the contradictions that arise from the traditional framings of our field in the context of this paper. We also describe our approach for exploring this problem space both theoretically and practically. For this, we reflect on our contributions to MAZI, an interdisciplinary and EU-funded research project at the interface of DIY networking technology, participatory design and civic political initiatives, which allows for practical exploration of this query on various levels. After describing the structure and setup of the project as interpreted through the lens of the problem space laid out in the paper, we discuss preliminary insights that emerge from the project work vis-à-vis the issues presented and provide an outlook on future work.

Neste artigo, discutimos idéias, observações e conceitos derivados de um estudo de caso:

Chow, Rosan, Wolfgang Jonas, and Felicidad Romero-Tejedor. 2015. “Design Research in Germany?” Design Issues 31 (1): 3–6.

2016

Synesthetic translation, historically applied to artistic productions and in the twentieth century applied by scholars to neuroscience to explain the unity of the senses, is addressed, defined and illustrated in this paper with regard to designing access to content. In particular, the paper shows how the concept of accessibility, underlying every interlinguistic translation process, may be promoted by synesthetic translations, i.e. particular types of intersemiotic translation – among various codes (verbal, figurative, sonorous, etc.) – in which the original text (prototext) and the translated text (metatext) use different sensory registers. The goal is to achieve a form of design that grants everyone access to content (design for all). This paper compares synesthetic practices in typhlology, i.e. aimed at the blind, with extravisual communication design techniques. The conclusion is that all too often, despite having access to the necessary tools, visual designers tend to neglect t...

Presented at INSIGHT Design research Symposium, NID, 2018

In recent years design and design research shifted from isolated tasks to tackling complex problems such as sustainable development and integrated innovation. These challenges cross the borders of established academic disciplines and exceed the expertise of specialists; rather, they require knowledge, methods, and approaches from several academic fields as well as from scholars and from practitioners. Proceeding from the definition of the terms 1.) multi-disciplinarity, 2.) pluridisciplinarity 3.) cross-disciplinarity, 4.) interdisciplinarity, and 5.) transdisciplinarity, including Michael Gibbons' concept of "Mode 1" and "Mode 2"-science, the paper continues with scrutinizing the controversially discussed question of whether design is a discipline or an 'undisciplinable' profession. On that basis the paper presents the program and measures taken at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland, to encourage researchers to engage in inter-and transdisciplinary research projects. Furthermore, it presents two case examples of inter-and a transdisciplinary research projects, conducted by researchers from the School of Art & Design/Competence Centre Design & Management, in collaboration with colleagues from the School of Social Work and School of Business. Finally, the paper concludes by pointing out the specific requirements of conducting inter-and transdisciplinary research projects.

“Community Now?” is a bilateral, German-Israeli cooperation that researches ways of providing access and facilitating alternative forms of debate and engagement from a design research perspective – especially with regards to socio-political processes in urban environments. Embracing the “social turn” within the field of design and the related challenges, the project’s overarching goal is the inclusion of a wide range of citizens in societal and political decision making processes that are increasingly becoming digitized. The digitization of such processes fosters participation, but also entails a digital divide that builds on unequal access of individuals to ICTs. Consequently the project aims at activating and empowering those who are passive or marginalized to take on ownership of such processes. In the last two years, numerous spaces and frameworks, tools and interventions have been created as researchers, students and local partners from both countries collectively worked on these interrelated topics, leading to the development of contextualized tools for urban explorations. At the base of the endeavor to develop hybrid tools in a participatory and inclusive way lies the Living Lab approach. With “Community Now?” we explore both the possibilities and the restrictions of such an approach. In this paper, we present and contextualize the tools and processes that have been developed and implemented during the course of the cooperation in Berlin, at the Living Lab Mehringplatz, Kreuzberg, as well as in Jerusalem in the neighborhood of the bilingual, Arabic-Hebrew Max Rayne Hand in Hand School.

Tom Bieling é co-fundador da Design Research Network, é professor visitante em Ciências Aplicadas e Arte na Universidade Alemã do Cairo e realiza pesquisa na Berlin University of the Arts. Desde 2007 ele vem pesquisando no Design Research Lab. Antes disso, ele estudou Design em Cologne (Alemanha) e Curitiba (Brasil).

2016

Card Games Creation as a Learning Method .

2018

The society we live in today is undergoing a paradigm shift (Murray 2009). The crisis of the capitalist model is creating the need for certain social innovation processes (Murray et al. 2010, Manzini 2015). This paper presents an example of how social innovation and service design (Meroni and Sangiorgi 2012, Stickdorn and Schneider 2012) can promote local territories through making. We tested a “what-if” situation to answer the following research questions: a) what kind of maker space could work in this territory; b) who are the potential users; and c) if making could increase the local territory’s appeal for social innovation. Using the method of action research (Stringer 2014, Stoecker 2012), we created a demonstration plan we refer to as demo service in order to experiment with different kinds of activities and areas of application. The MakeinProgress (MiP) project was then initiated. MiP was a case study of the way making could facilitate local development (Bianchini et al. 2014...