Design is bound up with cultures, expression and creativity, but also contexts of various interests, aesthetics, use and interpretation.
We investigate different modes of designing. We work with various situations of situated use. Different means of expression and articulation comprise design and related research that have a cultural focus. This involves us in a mix of activities that range from close, detailed desinging around finding ways of achieving sensitive and engaging cultural expression to much broader sociocultural studies of desing and use that are grounded in historical, ethnographic and interpetative inquiry. Drawing on research theories and methods from the humanities and social sciences, we also orient these towards socio-technical practices. We extend this to emergent design expressions, including the performative shaping and uptake of design by individuals, stakeholder and communities. This incudes work with very real, current demands and potential. It also involves engaging with the speculative and imaginary and how it may be embodied in acts of designing for affective involvement and through our shared expression.
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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 »
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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 »
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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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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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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 »
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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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This PhD is a study of the designs of commenting sections in online magazines and newspapers. 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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This PhD research is part of the Ulstein Bridge Concept project. The main focus is the super complex process of generating new conceptual design solutions in the recreation of the entire offshore ship bridge. My special interest is how the participants in the team of the research project Ulstein Bridge Concept (UBC) collect knowledge, mediate design competence, and collaborate in their effort of doing design innovation. The main focus is innovation in the fuzzy front end, conceptualisation and design collaboration. 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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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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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 »
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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 »