In design research ecology may be understood in its widest sense as making systems sustainable that include a variety of domains and issues. These include the environmental, life cycle, technological, political, social and technological and economic.
The earth is rapidly moving towards a state of total ‘gardening’: we live in a world where there is no longer such a thing as untouched nature. This demands a radical redefinition of ecological action. As a result, design research needs to move from notions and practices of preservation towards design for complexity. In this view, ecologies need to be seen as developmental, multiple constructions and entities. They intersect with one another and they are at the same time often emergent. Here research may adopt incremental and radical innovation approaches.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 »
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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 »