Changing the change

The Conference Program is ready! It has been conceived to find an effective compromise between different, equally important demands: to give many design researchers the opportunity to present their work and the time to discuss it with others; to listen to several plenary session speeches; to participate in debates on specific topics and, finally, to have time and spaces for open discussions that prepare the ground for the final statements of the whole conference.

There are 4 main components in the program : 3 conference streams and 1 visualisations exhibition. These are:

1. SELECTED PAPERS MODULES. This is, of course, the Conference core: 138 papers are presented in 6 parallel themes of 4 modules each. The themes and the module sub-themes emerged from the clusterization of selected papers. They are:
   1. VISIONS (Ways of living, Ways of producing);
   2. PROPOSALS (Daily life solutions, Enabling Systems);
   3. TOOLS (Design Theories, Design Methods).
2. PRESENTATIONS BY INVITED SPEAKERS. 8 international speakers have been asked to give an overview of their countries or regions in terms of design research and its contributions in changing the change. As a whole, they outline the state of design research for sustainability worldwide. These presentations will take place each day, in late morning plenary sessions. They are:
   
   Bill Moggridige, USA; Geetha Narayanan, INDIA; Luisa Collina, ITALY; Mugendi M Rithaa, SOUTH AFRICA; Aguinaldo dos Santos, BRAZIL; Lou Yongqi, CHINA; Fumi Masuda, JAPAN; Cris Ryan, AUSTRALIA.
3. EMERGING ISSUES PROCESS. It is a series of activities (a round table, an international project session, an open discussion) that aim to produce the final output of the conference in a participatory way and make the first steps in possible post-conference initiatives. As a whole, they can be seen as a bottom-up process of theme generation. These initiatives will take place in late afternoon plenary sessions, on the first and second days, and in 6 parallel sessions and in the final plenary final one on the third day.
4. VISUALISATIONS EXHIBITION. It is a loop of video projections visualising the output of some selected papers. The aim is to promote the idea that design research can also be a process leading to highly communicative results.

Outcomes

• The meeting of a worldwide community of design researchers is, in fact, both a cultural and a political event. An event like this should leave a trace (in the community’s culture) and give directions (about future steps to be taken). For this reason, the Conference will produce a final document in the form of a short text pinpinting emerging issues and indicating promising directions of research. We can call it: Design research agenda for sustainability:
• In a previous design conference (the Cumulus Design Conference, held in Kyoto the 28th of March 2008) a declaration, linking design and sustainability, was signed by a large number of design schools. This declaration is not only highly symbolic (having being signed in Kyoto) but also potentially relevant. The Design research agenda for sustainability, which will be the main output of the Changing the Change Conference can be considered one of the possible implementations of the Kyoto Declaration: a document that must give research directions in order to develop the necessary design knowledge to become real. That is, for us, to Change the Change.

Final Visualisations deadline expired on June 3rd, 2008. We received about 30 Visualisations of the selected papers. Now we are preparing the Exhibit at Changing the Change. On one hand, we applied the same clusters of the papers: visions, proposals and tools are the main themes of final Visualisations. Most of them are proposals and visions. On the other hand, we can identify different genres and languages for communicating design research. In particular, the exhibition will show photographic sequences and collages or graphs and diagrams.
Of course, the first ones are much more iconographic, visual and imaginative ways of representation. They can visualize subjects, showing actions and telling stories for stimulating the imagination. The second ones refer to a symbolic language, which is useful for defending a thesis. They are able to explain subjects, arguing theoretic thoughts and concepts, building relationships between issues and items. Their final result is abstraction. It is a rational way of communicating to peers, while the other language is much more intuitive and emotional and it can be understood by a wider audience. Of course, we can find also hybrid rhetoric and languages. We think that the brief format requested (35 secs) is an useful exercise of communication. It also allows getting a wide and complete look at the themes presented, stimulating the dialogue on urgent issues. Visualisations Exhibit will offer another way of looking at design research presented at Changing the Change.

How does Design Research communicate itself? Of course, design research has the responsibility to deal with the transformations of the world and society, in order to identify and declare the emerging trends. It also has the responsibility of communicate its objectives, to spread knowledge and make it diffuse, as popular as it can. Communicating means telling stories, sharing knowledge, building new aesthetics for complexity and making theorethical issues tangible and comprehensible problems.

Visualisations will be an exhibition at Changing the Change Conference. Video projections will show participants’ research results as solutions proposals, visions of possible worlds or tools to enhance them. All of them have to be proposed in a highly communicative way as animated storyboards (animatic) or short sequences of images (slideshow) (For more information, search for “Submission Guidelines” on the website).

Visualisations exhibition wants to offer the opportunity to look at design research as a communicative process with different audiences: users, peers, companies and institutions. Changing the Change is looking for new ways of expression and dialogue. Lets start from the scientific community: how can we talk each other? The exhibition at Changing the Change Conference is a step towards the building of a peer to peer communication strategy. We would like to collect and make accessible design research materials, a network of visions for communicating international design research.

To achieve this end, according to the policy of sharing knowledge, we encourage the liberalization of certain rights, as advocated by the Creative Commons licenses (www.creativecommons.org). Nothing will impair or restrict the author’s moral rights, but organizers of Changing the Change Conference and Exhibit will be legitimated to distribute and share Visualizations. Works will be accessible to peers, as it is a key principle underpinning social interaction. We guarantee the attribution of each work, both in the case of video projection and other publication and distribution artifacts (For more information, search for “Rights” on the website).

Of course, your works are dedicated to different themes and urgent issues. Communication rhetoric and languages seem various and interesting too. Some of them come from documentary and ethnography, others look like interfaces for service systems; some are visions, others tools. We think that video (even a slideshow) can help to represent complexity. Is that true for design research? In the era of bottom-up contents and diffuse creativity the ability of image production is widespread. Is there a designerly way of communicating? Could we identify a common ground? Are there different genres for different kind of design research?

Visualisation is an important part of design activities helping to anticipate the future developments of a project and stimulate discussion between the different players involved. So, within design research too, and especially design research for sustainability, visualisations should play an important role in stimulating social conversation among a large number of different actors, on possible alternatives to the mainstream model.
In the Sustainable Everyday project below, visualisations in the form of short films have been made showing different “life bites” from possible new and more sustainable lifestyles. Each focuses on one particular character and shows how they organise themselves in everyday life, be it through a workshop offering equipment to maintain and repair products, a service to customise different alternative mobility solutions or a training initiative to foster energy saving and local production.

The movies are short clips based on real characters interacting against a patchwork background picturing the mix of resources available in each place. The video writing is deliberately rough and imperfect: it belongs to the category of quick ‘Video sketches’ promptly made during the reflection stage. They are realistic enough visualisations to enable users to project themselves into the scene, but at the same time have the unfinished status of a draft to allow for interpretation and adaptation of the proposition.
Eighteen such Video sketches have been developed to produce a wider range of visions of possible alternative sustainable lifestyles. As shown in the matrix below the visions can be read from different points of view.

Vertically, it starts from main everyday life functions (How to do the shopping? How to maintain objects? How to move around in the city? etc…) to introduce six multi-services centres (the Food Atelier, the handyman Shop, the Mobility Agency, etc…) each one offering a range of more sustainable solutions around a domestic function.

Horizontally, it shows three different types of more sustainable lifestyles and related strategic design approaches to develop sustainable solutions (a Quick mode based on standard, efficient solutions; a Slow mode, enhancing personal involvement in the search of quality; a Co-op mode based on collaboration and sharing).

Finally, across the matrix, three different characters act in the different scenes and demonstrate how they fit together in coherent lifestyles.
Taking this last approach one step further, the eighteen movies have been used in different interactive exhibitions around the world, where visitors were able to take the role of one of the three actors in the movies and compose their own lifestyle, both satisfying their own needs and improving their average sustainability. The visualisations were used as ‘lifestyle building blocks’, showing everyday solutions, to facilitate dialogue about possible, desirable and more sustainable futures with a wider public. The visualisation of scenes of everyday life enabled people from different backgrounds and cultures to picture a possible implementation of these solutions, in their own day to day. They were able to grasp complex strategies for sustainability by seeing them from the user point of view, discuss advantages and inconveniences, and finally project themselves into a vision.

Is it possible to organise an exhibition from design research results? Could this be useful in promoting the transition towards sustainability? In principle the answer should be yes: design research in general, and design research for sustainability, in particular, should generate visions and proposals in a highly communicative way. That is, it should produce high quality visual contents easily presentable in an exhibition. In practice, things are not exactly like that: for many years design research has been mostly oriented in other directions, i.e. towards theoretical and methodological studies. This kind of research is good and necessary, of course, but the result is that today, even though the number of design research conferences, journals and papers is growing, few proposals of new solutions and even fewer visions of possible futures are emerging as design research results. On the other hand, some designers who are developing visions and proposals very rarely consider themselves as researchers and their work as design research.

The Changing the Change initiative aims to promote and give higher visibility to the results of these formal and informal research projects. Therefore, in the process of selecting papers, a special consideration will be given to abstracts and papers presenting highly communicative visual contents.

However, this is only the first step. What we want to do is to organise, in parallel to the Conference, a design research exhibition, Changing the Change: visions and solutions, to make these visions and solutions more accessible, i.e. visible and understandable, to a wider public. For this reason, we are also calling for ad hoc visualisations to be used in the original exhibition we intend to organise. Similarly to the related papers, they may refer to different fields of application: from health, to food; from mobility to fashion; from caring for children to social services, but they must present a clear common denominator: they must show what it could be like to live and to produce in a more sustainable way.

For those who are familiar with traditional research conferences, it has to be underlined that the visualisations we are calling for here are not traditional scientific posters. Such posters are presentations on paper of the same contents as could otherwise have been presented orally at the conference. Here we are referring to visualisations that must be self-standing, highly communicative visions and proposals that must be accessible to the exhibition public at large. (for practical indications on how to submit a visualisation, see in the News and Notes section of this Newsletter and in the Changing the Change website).