Design research is constantly in need of a critical and interpretative views. This matters because we need to unpack the processes of designing. It is important that we are able to to make explicit the legacies of what we design and the designs we study, along with their dynamics and power to communicate.
Products, interactions, systems and services – and their blends – embed and encapsulate choices and configurations. These too are situated in contexts of their shaping, use and circulation. Research in design builds knowledge through making and reflection on it, including the generation of new concepts and methods. Yet it also tackles how and what we know by applying and critiquing theoretical and methodological approaches. Our view is that criticality is often also a tacit part of the activities of designing and needs to be highlighted in interpretative, hermeneutic and theoretically rich analyses. Design research needs to draw on a variety of research methods and approaches that also connect to the roles and functions of design in social, cultural and political contexts. Criticality has a cental role in teasing out the methodological approaches and modes of knowing that are implicated within practice-informed and practice-led research in design. Design also needs theory building and this too is included in our perspective on a sociocultural framing of design and research.
)
In Biomenstrual, we imagine and experiment with sustainable, multispecies, ecofeminist practices of human menstrual care. We shift from discourses of menstrual management and hygiene, to community and more-than-human health care practices where caring for menstrual health is also an environmentally nurturing practice. Read »
)
This project assembles the body of transdisciplinary PhD outputs in Design at AHO in the form of compilation based and monograph type theses, supported by institutional, national and international research funding. Specific PhD projects in addition each have their own project page and links to related larger projects and research networks. Read »
)
Engaging in tangled futures Pressure to understand and respond to complex futures is building. In the context of climate change and increased global movement of people and commodities, our futures are systemically and creatively entwined. Making sense of immediate, near and far flung futures needs to tackle a growing and emerging entanglement of diverse interests and motivated social and political formations Anticipatorially! Read »
)
My PhD positions Systems Orientated Design (SOD), collaborative governance and Foresight as framing thematics of an anticipatory systems approach to my research focus area. My study is situated in a South African context and I am investigating how an anticipatory systems approach to design research might lead to shaping better and more sustainable futures of local actors in the Stellenbosch river catchment area. Read »
)
This project aims to build an understanding of service design to help design practitioners building the cultural sensitivity and investigates how an emerging conception of cultural plurality can be used in order to both offer a more inclusive and respectful narrative of the complexity of culture and to reimagine the boundaries of service design in plurality. Read »
)
The notion of “ReFuturing” enables long term sustainable futures by means of rethinking and reimagining futures as the material and ecological consequences of climate breakdown that our designed culture in the coming century will face and even beyond the ones we are already experiencing today. Read »
)
FUEL4DESIGN (F4D) supports the discipline of Design and its MA and PhD students and teachers in Higher Education Institutions to productively anticipate critical futures learning needs and change processes through sustained future making. Read »
)
AMPHIBIOUS TRILOGIES is a research through an extended choreography. The main aim is to artistically explore and monitor littoral spaces (between land and sea) via an extending choreography of related literal, limbic and liminal conditions, environments and articulations. Three subjects are set in motion; choreography, design fiction and sociology of the sea. They will be probed interconnectedly within three thematics/works: ‘island’, ‘pond’ and ‘passage’. Physical and remotely-sensed sea journeys, island hopping and pond wallowing are examples of research activities. Read »
The project focuses on how digital technologies and media enable new ways of designing urban services and positively affect issues of urban liveability, sustainability, design and governance of cities and urban space. Read »
)
This 7th Nordic Design Research Conference comes at a time when earlier social, political and economic conditions, expectations and frameworks are under pressure, and indeed change, globally. Relations between design and power are today perhaps more present that before and them are seemingly strongly polarised. What then are design practitioners, educators, researchers, policy makers and activists, among others, to make of these changes and how are they to engage in effecting informed, ethical, participative and meaningful change? Read »
)
Anticipation 2017 is a unique, radically interdisciplinary forum for exploring how ideas of the future inform action in the present. It brings together researchers, policy makers, scholars and practitioners to push forward thinking on issues ranging from modelling, temporality and the present to the design, ethics and power of the future. AHO is represented on the Organising Committee by Professor Andrew Morrison and has funded the conference website. This conference brings fresh input from design inquiry to this futures event. Read »
)
Design views on Additive Manufacturing (AM) are still rarely found in the burgeoning body of publications on materials, technology and business. This AHO design centred Product Design oriented take on AM draws together a variety of transdisciplinary perspectives on AM. Our shared knowledge is presented as offering a unique design view that suggests ways that methods and processes of engaging with AM tools and technologies may be better understood in the context of discourses of digital fabrication. Read »
)
The designBRICS project is a platform for a lean network of different design institutes in BRICS countries and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). The BRICS are represented by the design departments at Hunan University (HNU) in China and Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) in South Africa. Read »
)
Commissioned by the AHO Board as a Review of Research, the Quality for Impact project aims to build knowledge about research at AHO and its relation to wider professional, educational, commercial and societal impact. The qualitative nature of the study will help develop situated knowledge about a diversity of approaches and insights in ‘design’ based inquiry. Read »
)
The primary deliverable for this project is the free, open source Vega platform, intended for publishing digital and media-rich academic research in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences. This content-management system will be a ‘turnkey’ publishing platform for print-like and scholarly multimedia journals, books, and data sets. The platform includes features that will help editors and publishers provide an accessible, secure, sustainable, flexible, open, free, and collaborative environment for authors and readers to engage with building and reading multimedia-rich, peer-reviewed content. Read »
)
“Prototyping services for policy-learning”, the PhD project of Manuela Aguirre, attempts to bridge Systems Oriented Design (SOD) and Service Design (SD) fields within the context of the public sector. Read »
)
The WONDER (Women in Design Research) network consists of female professors, post.docs and PhD students from the Scandinavian countries. Read »
)
At present the Circumpolar North provides a unique laboratory for studying future landscapes of production, infrastructure, excavation, and environmental change. Read »
)
The requirements of designing for immersion and designing for interaction present a range of dilemmas and opposing forces. This research project attempts to shed some light on how to untangle some of these conflicting requirements, from both a theoretical and a practical standpoint, in the particular context of art installation environments – spaces that are open to the public and promise to reward visitors with some kind of ‘experience’. Read »
)
The main objective of the Action is to foster a trans-disciplinary network of key stakeholders that identify new approaches, policies and research priorities for the emerging theme of smart and liveable cities and so enable people to co-create cities within a people-centred framework. Read »
)
Matters to do with methods are often underplayed in design research – energy that goes into designing is not always turned onto experimentation in research methods. We see a need to more fully explore how richer relationships can be built between the techniques of designing and the methods of researching in a qualitative mode. Read »
)
The DDDE-project is planned to be a three yearlong R&D endeavor where the ultimate and over-arching goal is to develop a more profound understanding of aspects that underpin good design educations in a northern Europe context (funding for last year 2013/14 tbc). Three Scandinavian design schools therefore started 2011/12 to identify and address contemporary challenges within design education. The schools are: (i) Designskolen Kolding, Denmark (ii) The Institute of Design at the School of Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway (iii) Konstfack, Sweden Read »
)
)
The mediation of research to a variety of audiences is becoming increasingly important. How are we to depict, demonstrate and convey our design practices while at the same time communicating our analyses of them and their connection to other studies? What can the various domains of design bring to the presentation of design research and what roles can interaction and communication design play in mediating our processes, methods, rhetorics and insights? How can we make apparent the character of project-based and collaborative inquiry? Read »
)
The concept of Systems Oriented Design is developed by Prof. Birger Sevaldson and collegues in the context of the OCEAN design research association and AHO. The main intention with this concept is to develop design proprietary skills, techniques and methods for systems thinking and systems practice in design. Read »
)
The goal of this PhD-project is to develop frameworks and practices within design research that support early-phase exploration and shaping of emerging technologies. Read »
)
The goal of the RHYME project is to improve health and life quality for persons with severe disabilities, through use of “co-creative tangibles”. These are ICT based, mobile, networked and multimodal things, which communicate following musical, narrative and communicative principles. They are interactive, social, intelligent things that motivate people to play, communicate and co-create, and thereby reduce passivity and isolation, and strengthen health and well-being. Read »
)
)
Doctoral level research in design is relatively new in comparison with that in other disciplines. AHO has a well established doctoral programme that increasingly features projects in diverse areas of design. Little research has been done on the processes and activities involved in doctoral design, from practice to critical reflection and in collaborative learning and formal writing. Read »
)
This thesis research makes a case for full-body movement as a creative material in explorative design processes of movement-based digital interactions. The thesis is positioned within the domains of and intersections between digital technology, performance and communication. Read »
)