Our societies are highly dynamic today. In many cases designs are no longer seen as finite but rather are now understood as being open. These designs are under constant renegotiation within a dynamically developing contexts.
In such contexts, in design and research we need to be able to be pro-active, in addition to being responsive. This means thay ultimately design can have a guiding and motivating role if we view design being under continuous development rather than seeing it through the lens of one of control and perfection. Generative design allows us to tackle the processes of emergent designing and its consquences of need and situation. These range from collaborative design to emergent social networks and to versioning. An increasing number of designed artefacts are developed in contexts of emergency that need to be adaptively enacted. A generative design approach enables us as designers and researchers to meet such challenges and needs and to do so generatively, drawing on other related knowledge, tools and activities.
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This research project explores the ways in which people can purposefully shape social structures—shared norms, rules, roles, values and beliefs. Social structures are recognized as a key leverage point in the transformation of social systems. 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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SEDNA (“Safe maritime operations under extreme conditions: the Arctic case”) is a research project that is developing an innovative and integrated risk-based approach to safe Arctic navigation, ship design and operation. 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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The inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities in the workplace is limited. It is challenging to find, secure and keep suitable jobs. The majority go directly on to disability income after finishing high school. The InnArbeid project investigates how to improve this transition from school and into a working life. The aim is to develop services and technology that enable young people with intellectual disabilities to make use of their abilities in the workplace. This will bring about benefits both to the individual – in terms of improved quality of life – and for society at large, in terms of reduced expenses and an increased value creation. 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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The PhD research project, a part of AHO’s continued involvement in research on Additive Manufacturing (AM), aims to investigate the possibilities of Additive Manufacturing, popularly labelled 3D printing, in the field of Product Design. Read »
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The project facilitates knowledge transfer between ongoing research projects and research and development projects in industry. It arranged and facilitated meeting between academia, industry and design service providers. Read »
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It is important for marine industry to harvest data from ongoing marine activities to ensure development of competitive ships and equipment. The study involved planning, carrying out and analyzing of multiple field trips to vessels operating in the north sea. 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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Teaching ergonomics to design students is closely related to the philosophy and concepts of Universal design, inclusive design and design for all. Another term in this field is Design for diversity. Read »
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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 »
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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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What if we could redefine the whole bridge environment and change everything from the room layout to furniture design, and from the fundamental interaction techniques to details on the screen? This is the scope for the researchers, designers and engineers developing the Ulstein Bridge Concept (UBC) project. Together we aim to create research and designs that can direct the development of the future ship bridges of offshore service vessels. Read »
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Digital technology offers the possibility to rethink the design process even to a degree where our conception of visual creativity is questioned. This thesis investigates the preconditions for an expansion of the traditional design techniques, and to invent, explore, develop and systematise new techniques that are specially developed to draw advantage from design computing. This thesis documents and develops a long-term exploration of a special type of design, the digital design that appeared during the nineties and that possibly started with the animation techniques introduced by Greg Lynn and the experimental use of diagrams introduced by Peter Eisenman. Read »