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