One of the most distinguishing core competencies of design is the ability to make future, not-yet-existing, products and user situations graspable and ready and open to experience.
We see a crucial need to expand the scope of design and inquiry to make ungraspable, but still possible and plausible, futures that are positioned well ahead of our current point in time. The purpose of this is to imagine, project and facilitate designs and debates that are decades ahead of our immediate scope and perceptions. This is an important stance for design to adopt because here is an urgent need to address pressing and immediate challenges such as climate change. In researching design futures our task is to find compelling, radical alternative paths of development.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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“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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This research project is about exploring and bring forward new knowledge about the evolving practice of healthcare service design in the context of design labs. It was carried out using action research as an approach, through establishing four embedded design labs inside three different large hospitals in Norway over a period of six years, to study how healthcare service design is practiced and may be advanced in design lab settings. Read »
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The Centre for Connected Care (C3) aims to accelerate adoption and diffusion of patient-centric innovations that change patient pathways and delivery systems, empower the patients and increase growth in the healthcare industry. The ambition is to bring together different stakeholders to research and co-develop new knowledge, infrastructure and healthcare services. 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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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 »
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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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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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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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