Reflections / Blog

My new site is rolling.

I am committing the ultimate crime in the age of Google. I am changing my URL. All the links will be broken - I will go out of existence, web-vise. But I will be back from the new and better site.

Next & More is my personal platform for research and consulting. Today I am combining these two in an effort to explore design, and in the future I will seek out new clients and collaborators, as well as new research projects.

New site: www.nextandmore.com ;

New RSS feed: feed://http//nextandmore.com/feed/  

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WHAT!??? radio silence for 8 moths and then three posts in one day??

I have been interviewed for the Inform magazine -  the quaterly of Danish Designers. The focus was on Design's potential as a research discipline. Research-through-design is something I have been focused on during most of my research, and in my dissertation I tried to make a broad argument why it makes sense.

The Inform article tries to make a popular recap of this argument. Helle from Danish Designers have done a marvelous job with writing it together.

Possibly I can post a summary here later - maybe on the new site.

I have been interviewed to the yearly report from The Danish Design Research Center as well, but this is stil unpublished, so I will get back to you on that. 

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This week I presented the work I have done on design research as the closing keynote at the Art of Research seminar at University of Art and Design Helsinki.

The talk was a summarry of the work I did in my PhD in order to explore and argue for the fact that design research - especially in a research-through-design persective - can be seen as a fully qualified and valid, academic, scientific form of research.

I had great fun actually writing this section last year and exploring all the nerdy philosophy-of-science readings I could find relating to design. Usually other PhD's hate this part of the dissertation, but I found it ot be almost relieving tension, as I found that it was EASY to argue for the fact that design research - and my little research project - was valid science.

I put the presentation on to Slideshare.net - hope it works.

 

 

And if you are interested a copy of the dissertation where the actual detailed work is presented, then please send me a line.

 

 

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Visiting the FLOW Market at Danish Design Center in Copenhagen yesterday I read the heartbreaking and foundation shocking piece of statistics-spam on one of the counters:

1 billion people live on less than 1 US$ a day. Each cow in the European Union receives a total of 2 US$ a day in subsidies

Make me think:

1) What? Are we insane?

2) Cows are great of course, but do they really need that much subsidizing?

3) Lately I have noticed in newspaper that the standard on poverty has been upgraded living on less than 2US$ a day. That’s not because we are getting richer on the global level but because the dollar is becoming cheaper and cheaper for some reason...

The Flow Market is a deeply provocative installation commenting on the entirety of our current society: how we overwork, get stressed, lose meaning of life, are stuck in uncreative patterns

See the ‘Did you know…’ section for more interesting spamtistics.

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In Columbus, Ohio Liz Sanders is doing undercover work to implement participatory design into architectural practice. She resigned from SonicRim two years ago and have been working “under the radar” since. Liz Sanders is of course one of the most renowned PD researchers and practitioners around after her work especially on “Say, do, make” which all designers and design students must read.

So now she is working with architectural company NBBJ in Columbus to develop processes where e.g. nurses can participate in the design of new hospitals and other methods. I have recently heard of other people working towards the same goal, and the built environment is definitely a field where listening to users is increasingly important. Profit optimisation is not always the best driver of architectural quality…

Liz makes maketools or exercises that will give users a way to give input to the design process. Rumour has it that she is also co-authoring a book on this very subject, so stay tuned for that. Thomas and Eva presented their work on design games and there seemed to big a pretty big overlap in these processes of game and exercise. The main difference could be, though, that calling the process a game could take some of the seriousness away from the interactions, which again can be a good and/or a bad thing depending on what your goal is.

The images are of Thomas, Eva, Liz and her two colleagues at NBBJ; Stephanie Patton and Lindsay Kenzig.

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