Innovation between industry and design.
Reflection and critical analysis. Emerging
technologies and co-creation for special needs.
Wicked problems and online mediation of
design processes and research. The fuzzy
front end of new service development. Socio-
cultural approaches to interaction design. Shap-
ing futures and sustainability through design.
Interdisciplinary, networked, and discursive
design informed knowledge production. These
are some of the concerns in contemporary
design inquiry that are taken up at the Centre
for Design Research at AHO in our wide port-
folio of projects.
In November 2011 we launched the Centre
forDesignResearch at an international seminar
entitled “Communicating Research Elegantly”.
The Centre was established to provide a plat-
form for reaching further into design-based
inquiry, together with its theoretical, method-
ological and applied concerns. The seminar
launch presented the main structure and goals
of our research in design within the domains of
products, interactions, systems, and services.
Conscious of the need to connect and differen-
tiate these domains and their related projects,
we chose to build a matrix like structure across
the centre around a set of core themes and
predominant approaches. The themes include
Cultures, Ecologies, Futures, Interactions, Ser-
vices, Systems and Things. Approaches entails
techniques and methods that are Consultative,
Critical, Discursive, Experimental, Generative
and Retrospective. This allows us to also situ-
ate and to critique the increasingly interdisci-
plinary and hybrid nature of design inquiry, its
knowledge building processes and a diversity
of outcomes that need to be oriented to vari-
ous audiences. The launch seminar included
important international linkages, such as that
with the Design Research Institute (DRI) at
the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
(RMIT) in Australia.
Our research projects help to build wider
international research networks such as an
EU funded project into Service Innovation in
Tourism, in addition to our goal of building
stronger Nordic links in design research, prin-
cipally through the Nordic Design Research
Association NORDES (
).
We contribute articles and reviews to vari-
ous international journals and organizations,
participate on several boards of journals and
organizations, as well as acting as master’s and
PhD external examiners. An important strategic
move in 2012 has been to publish international-
ly, especially in online formats.
Project based and collaborative inquiry
has been central to our international research
participation and outputs in 2012. This can be
seen, for example in the two research projects,
RHYME and YOUrban, both funded by the
VERDIKT programme at the Research Council
of Norway. Both projects have been highlighted
by the programme as exemplary of the blend of
practice and theory, construction and critique
▴
‘Immaterials: Light
Painting WIFI’, YOUr-
ban project (Einar
Martinussen and Jørn
Knutsen) and Making
Visbile PhD project
(Timo Arnall)
◂
Immersive experi-
ence in the installa-
tion ‘Submergence’,
Anthony Rowe and
Squid Soup, Ocean of
Light project
▸
Centre for Design
Research opening
seminar ‘Commu-
nicating Research
Elegantly’, Jonathan
Romm tries out the
3D spectacles at the
accompanying ex-
hibition
Shaping futures
