Design research extends beyond typical concenrs with products, interactions and services to also centre on the communicative. Discursive design refers to inquiry that takes materials, media and articulations of designing as its core concern.
Here the focus is on how research moves into the mediational and speculative. It is the subjunctive, projected and proposed that are shaped, conveyed and critiqued. This approach however also considers the means and technologies of today as well as their potential uses beyond the concerns and perceptions of the here-and-now. Such speculative and discursive constructions work to stumulate discusion and open out for debate and become discursive artifacts in their own right. Discursive design includes and aray of materials and processes of construction and mediation, such as in the form of online explanatory films and ‘fictional’ narrative works. Design research needs to extend its repertoires of communicating the making and the reflexive reflection on it.
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Understand and capture long-term sustainability in ecological crises by imagining and investigating future life forms and styles. Read »
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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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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H-SEIF or Human Systems Engineering Innovation Framework is a research project that aims at developing new methods for Human Centred Systems Engineering. Read »
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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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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PERFORM – Making Movement Matter is a transdisciplinary, practice-based research project that explores digital and visual engagement with kinaesthesia – our awareness of body position and movement. Through digital tools and improvisational workshops the aim is to examine how a heightened experience of kinaesthesia may play a role in identifying new, ethically responsible pathways to efficacy and social agency. Read »
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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 »
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Digital materials, tools, fabrication and distribution have grown rapidly in the past two decades. For design, at AHO this has not only had an impact on the foundations and growth of Interaction Design, but it has transformed part of our approach to what was earlier termed Industrial Design and now known as Product Design. Our work in Product Design has shifted through exploration and experimentation with 3D printing, more formally now known as Additive Manufacturing (AM). Read »
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This PhD explores Tangible Service Design Artifacting and investigates in which ways the design of physical attributes of tools can support relational challenges within multidisciplinary healthcare service development teams. Read »
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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 »
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“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 »
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The WONDER (Women in Design Research) network consists of female professors, post.docs and PhD students from the Scandinavian countries. Read »
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Service Design is rapidly expanding to include the provision of services for health and well-being. DOT is an AHO strategically funded initiative into the design-driven investigation of providing improved and new services for ‘welfare technology’ and person-centred health development. DOT refers to ‘Design for offentlige tjenester’ in Norwegian. Read »
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At present the Circumpolar North provides a unique laboratory for studying future landscapes of production, infrastructure, excavation, and environmental change. Read »
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There are increasing calls from the global climate change research community for new strategies for translating knowledge into action. Unfortunately, the Climate Change research communities seem to be alone in really understanding the magnitude of the problem and how the windows of opportunity to address the issue are closing in before our very eyes. C-SAN Futures addressed designerly strategies for scaling up climate change approaches in South Africa and Norway. It’s part of a network collaboration between the CDR at AHO and the Faculty of Informatics and Design at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). Read »
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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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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Service design must push its current boundaries of reference to incorporate wider impulses from the social sciences and humanities to allow for higher engagement at a socio-cultural level with service customers. Services are primarily defined by their intangibility and temporal nature where value is co-created during service delivery between customer and service provider. Rituals offer time-based structures that allow for the intangible to be made substantive and as well as frame works for the orchestrating of experiential high points and high seasons. Myths offer symbolic and binding narratives for service customers, which can create new fellowships that build lasting communities of a brand faithful. The research takes an explorative and practical approach based upon theories from social science. From these insights a new set of practical design tools are being developed which will be tested and assessed in New Service Development settings. Read »
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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 »
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Touch is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things. We are developing applications and services that enable people to interact with everyday objects and situations through their mobile devices. Touch consists of an inter-disciplinary team involved in social and cultural enquiry, interaction/industrial design, rapid prototyping, software, testing and exhibitions. Read »
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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 »
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This thesis analysis how the vast deployment of network and computational technologies into our spatial environments is prompting us to reconsider what “products” are, what they are made of and how they are designed. Moreover, I argue that we through a material and communicative design practice can contribute to foster agency and understanding, for both designer and the wider public sphere, within this sociotechnical context. Read »
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The PhD-project [designing innovation] investigates the ways professional designers work and how design influence innovation processes. The project is part of the larger research project D-side. The aim of this study is to develop a more consistent understanding among professional designers of the contribution from design knowledge. The study takes up what type of design abilities provide better working conditions for development of innovations in product development. Read »
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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 »
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A technique emerging from recent developments in lighting and computing is the use of three-dimensional arrays of controllable lights (LEDs) to create dynamic visual experiences that occupy physical space and can be explored from within. These techniques can be used to give the impression of presence, movement and form within physical space. The Ocean of Light project builds on previous experience to explore both the creative and artistic potential of such systems, principally when incorporated into interactive public art projects. Read »