Collaboration

DRS Affiliation with the College Art Association

The DRS recently joined the College Art Association (CAA) as an affiliated society. The CAA is an international art and design association based in the USA. They hold an annual conference in addition to other work including professional development support and advocacy.

The CAA has opportunities to get involved in their association. They’re inviting nominations and self-nominations to serve on award juries. There are multiple positions for jury members for awards of distinction, publication grants, fellowships and travel grants. Nominations close at the end of the month on 31 July.

The CAA also has open seats for committee members on topics including design, women in the arts and education. The CAA Professional Committees work on topics of special concern for the association and serve 3-year terms. Self-nominations are due 31 August.

Contact DRS Administrator Linda Anderson (admin@designresearchsociety.org) for more information about DRS affiliations.

Conference Report: EKSIG 2019

EKSIG 2019 was the international conference of the DRS Special Interest Group on Experiential Knowledge (EKSIG). The event took place 23–24 September 2019 at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, Estonia. With the theme ‘knowing together – experiential knowledge and collaboration,’ the conference explored collaborative knowledge generation by professionals and academic researchers in the creative disciplines and beyond.

The aim of the conference was to understand how individual experiential knowledge/knowledge gained by practice is shared; how collective experiential knowledge is accumulated/communicated in/through collaboration; and how experiential knowledge is embodied in outputs and can be traced back to practice. The conference also highlighted making as 'action of change': matter is transformed by a collaborative team and their material/non-material environments.

Top left: Keynote presenter Prof. Juhani Pallasmaa delivering his talk ‘Embodied and Empathic Knowledge – intuiting experience and life in architecture’ | Above centre: Participants interacting with an interactive play mat at a conference exhibition. Photos: Kristiine Špongolts.

The conference received great international response with submissions from researchers across four continents. Papers were interdisciplinary and came from fields including architecture, behavioural science, ceramics, culinary art, design engineering, digital craft, education, fashion and HCI.

Accepted submissions were organised around five strands: 

• Handmade and digital crafts in collaboration
• Making as action of change
• Collaboration toward sustainability
• Multi-stakeholder collaboration
• Collaboration and knowledge transfer

Above centre: Audience at presentations on handmade and digital crafts in collaboration. Photo: Kristiine Špongolts.

In addition to paper presentations, the conference had keynotes by Prof. Juhani Pallasmaa and Prof. Ron Wakkary, a workshop, and an exhibition featuring artefacts created in dialogue with papers presented at the conference.

Discussions among the conference delegates were very stimulating. The small scale of the conference (40 participants) created an informal and friendly environment that invited delegates to fully engage themselves in discussions. One of the most interesting conversations was about the generation/transfer of experiential knowledge in collaborative practices that extend collaboration to non-humans (i.e. materials, machines, matter and environment).

The post-conference publication will be a special issue of CoDesign to be published in 2020.

Author

Nithikul Nimkulrat, Conference Chair and EKSIG Convenor; Associate Professor, OCAD University, Canada

Review of the Seminario de Investigación en Diseño in Chile

The SID - Seminario de Investigación en Diseño (trans. Design Research Seminar) - is an annual event led by leading design research universities in Chile. The 2018 event took place November 20th and 21st at the newly inaugurated theatre of Biobío in the city of Concepción. The seminar explored topics including healthcare, sustainability, design education, design for public services and design heritage. These diverse topics offered a rich opportunity to discuss the state of design at national and international levels. The seminar also demonstrated growing academic interest in design research and the diverse needs of the Chilean society, which can be addressed by interdisciplinary research projects.

As announced in the May DRS Member's Newsletter, a DRS Special Session will be held at the 2018 DRS Conference in Limerick. This will take place on the last day of conference - Thursday 28 June, 12:45 - 14:00 in room KBG12. All DRS Members are invited to attend this session, where Council will report to members and begin discussion on the future of the DRS.

To be an international and representative community committed to promoting and developing design research, DRS Council believes the Society needs to engage in a more interactive and participatory way in setting future directions. However, the challenges in achieving this in contemporary contexts need to be recognised. As a starting point we propose to focus on four themes and conversations that will begin at the Special General Meeting.

So please come to this Special Meeting and help influence the future direction of the Society! If you're not coming to Conference (and even if you are), we encourage you to give us feedback directly using the online form.

Future DRS Feedback Form

You can also comment on the Future of DRS discussion Forum or email us directly: admin@designresearchsociety.org

Look out for further opportunities to engage during conference by following us on Twitter.

Moving Toward a Multilingual DRS Website

Starting from now, the DRS website will feature articles, event notices and job postings in their original language. We’ll also include an automatically generated English translation at the end of each post. This change is part of the process of developing our international presence and our commitment to supporting the global design research community.

Contact Isabel (editor@designresearchsociety.org) if you have news to share through the DRS online or have suggestions for the new DRS! 

The Latin American Design Meeting: A Space for Regional Conversations and Networking in Design

The Latin American Design Meeting is a popular and important event for Latin American design and design research communities. It’s a free annual event hosted by the Universidad de Palermo in Buenos Aires, Argentina that attracts approximately 400 presenters and 5000 visitors each year.

Violeta Szeps, general coordinator of the meetings, explained that the event focuses on “everything that matters to designers.” This includes design thinking and new digital technologies, as well as regionally specific topics like Latin American craft traditions and business and economics for local designers. It also takes place in parallel to other events including a design education conference that attracts design educators and researchers from across the region.

These annual meetings play an important role by creating new networks and fostering local design collaborations. They also support Latin American design communities by encouraging entrepreneurship and providing a space for local conversations, taking place in Spanish and Portuguese.

Although a regional design meeting, designers and design researchers from around the world are encouraged to attend. This year’s event takes place from July 30-August 3, 2018. You can see publications from past meetings online at http://fido.palermo.edu/servicios_dyc/encuentro2008/05_publicaciones/publicaciones_encuentro.html