Changing the Change

Dear colleagues and friends…

Monday, November 26th, 2007 by Ezio Manzini (conference coordinator)
1 comment »

This newsletter intends to facilitate the Changing the Change conference preparation. It will anticipate programmes, abstracts and speakers profiles. And it will give information on different kinds of Conference-related news. But not only. It also intends to be the platform for a discussion that will start with short interventions of different authors and will continue on the newsletter-related blog (the CtC Blog). This discussion will , I hope, continue beyond the conference itself.

In particular, in the next months, from now to January 2008, the newsletter main goal is to trigger design researchers to submit paper proposals coherent with the conference aims. This is not an easy task: Changing the Change wants to be a research conference with a strong and ambitious political goal: to focus on the design research potentialities in the transition towards a sustainable knowledge society. And to present them to the same design community (to make it more confident in its possibilities) and to other social actors (to contribute to the social conversations on the future and/or to solve some specific problems).

This conference, in the organisers’ intentions, should show that these design research potentialities exist. That they can be found in all the design application fields (form products to communication, from interiors to services, from ITC to crafts, from medical devices to fashion) and in all the regions of the world (from the most mature industrial societies to the emerging ones). Finally, it wants to state that the possibility to play a positive role in the transition towards sustainability is not only an issue for those designers who, in the past years, have taken the first steps in this direction, but it is a challenge for every designer and every design researcher.

To do all that, Changing the Change has to receive papers presenting and discussing stimulating design research results: visions, proposals and tools developed by design researchers (or better: by interdisciplinary teams where designers played an important role), using specific design skills and presented in an highly communicative way (i.e. with good visualization materials in order to create a parallel exhibition: visions and proposals from design research world wide).

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Tags:Conference, design research, papers, platform, preparation, sustainability

One Response to “Dear colleagues and friends…”

What do we mean by design research?

This conference is based on design research. The term design research can be defined in different ways. We have good reasons to find a definition that could fit well with the design activity.

Stuart Walker distinguishes three terms that are part of the designer’s task:

RESEARCH: diligent and systematic inquiry or investigation into a subject in order to discover, revise or establish new facts, theories, conclusions etc. SCHOLARSHIP: learning; knowledge acquired by study.
CREATIVITY AND CREATIVE ACTIVITY: the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination.

In addition, Ezio Manzini includes an important aspect of this kind of research activity:

a production of knowledge that can be shared and accumulated

(i.e. more people can work on the same issue, their results can be discussed and, some times, they can become the starting point for new steps forward). In an issue so big as the transition towards sustainability, the individual design research (that every good designer does at the beginning of a project) cannot be enough. Design for sustainability asks for a community of designers working and debating to build a new design knowledge, new scenarios, and new sets of proposals.

One type of research that the conference seeks to attract is the one that leads to a “physical artefact that manifests, articulates, illustrates and, through its use, demonstrates, the ideas presented.” (Walker)

Summing up: we are looking for a range of proposals –
• that emerge from diligent and systematic inquiry,
• that emerge from reflective scholarship,
• and/or
• that lead to design outcomes that manifest, articulate, illustrate and contribute to achieving the aims of the conference i.e. sharing information about how to integrate sustainability and design and which constructively advance our thinking and ability in Changing the Change.

Whether collective or individual, quantitative or qualitative, product-oriented, service-oriented, or system-oriented, we are looking for reports, presentations and descriptions of projects that open new possibilities for the integration of design and sustainability. We are particularly interested in projects that create knowledge that can be shared in a productive way among the participants, not as accummulated information, but as tools, methods and illustrative examples that can be transferred and used in situations beyond the ones that generated them.

Jorge Frascara, based on an exchange between Stuart Walker and Ezio Manzini

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Jorge Frascara says, on December 5th, 2007 at 7:30 pm:

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Dear colleagues and friends…

One Response to “Dear colleagues and friends…”

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