Workshops

DRS Workshops have become one of the most valued aspects of DRS conferences, providing a space for practical engagement and experimental sessions for conference participants to experience. 

For DRS2022 Workshops will be held in three ways: in person, online, or in hybrid format. Attendance to workshops is subject to prior registration, please follow the links below to register.

Theory beyond text: Instruments for design research

  • Date Sun, 26 June 2022, 09:00 – 13:00 CEST
  • Organizer Jacob Buur, Mette Gislev Kjærsgaard, Jessica Sorenson, Ayşe Özge Ağça
  • FORMAT FACE-TO-FACE

Current methods may not sufficiently support industrial UX design teams in dealing with emerging challenges of digitalization – when products and technologies become more interconnected. To imagine other futures, products and practices the theoretical perspectives through which they are formed are in need of change. This workshop investigates how to bring (e.g. anthropological) theories to work in industrial practices. Can we imagine theory beyond text? We ask participants to show their own examples of using ‘theory beyond text’ and we demonstrate Theory Instruments as our tangible proposal of bringing theoretical vocabulary into action in user research and organisational studies. We raise the fundamental question about how physicalizing theory – mapping abstract ideas onto material – creates new ways of thinking through things.

A sound idea: exploring sonic representations in service design

  • Date Sun, 26 June 2022 09:00 – 13:00 CEST
  • Organizer Vanessa Rodrigues, Ana Kustrak Korper, Stefan Holmlid
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Sounds are an inevitable part of service, providing cues for action and signaling consequences. However, dominant service design practices rarely consider the auditory components of service experience which, when translated to visual representations, might render certain aspects, such as experience of time, indiscernible. Thus, the main objective of this workshop is to explore the conscious integration of sound into service design and how it can inform and shape both the service and design practices. This workshop aims to generate novel insights on how current visual and embodied representations can be advanced and what kind of knowledge can be gained by including sonic components. The workshop explores the service context as an auditory space of integrating information and emotion.

Framing complexity in a meaningful way for transition designers

  • Date Sun, 26 June 2022 09:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Hannah Goss, Nynke Tromp
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Although designers are increasingly being called upon to respond to today’s complex challenges and transitions, there is a lack of methodology to support designers in their understanding of a system for the purpose of innovation (Murphy & Jones, 2021). In this workshop we explore various disciplinary mindsets and the methodological requirements for a transition design process. Participants learn about and explore multiple tools to meaningfully frame a system’s complexity. For example, by using The Transition Readiness Profiles (Goss et al, 2020), Causal-loop Diagrams (Kristel Van Ael et al., 2016), Leverage Points (Kristel Van Ael et al., 2016), and Systemic Theories of change (Murphy & Jones, 2021)). Upon leaving the workshop, participants will better understand the methodological considerations when using and developing tools in system design and transition design.

What are we talking about when we talk about ‘design’ for policy?

  • Date Sun, 26 June 2022 14:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Louise Mullagh, Scott Schmidt, Leon Cruickshank, Nuri Kwon
  • FORMAT face-to-face

The following is an official workshop of the DRS Design for Policy and Governance Special Interest Group (PoGoSIG). It is intended as a component of the DRS2022 theme track «Design for Policy and Governance: New Technologies, New Methodologies. During this workshop we will explore and develop what we mean by the term ‘design’ in design for policy, and explore ways in which creativity-based methodologies are being used with new modes of evidence. Participants will gain an overview of work being carried out in this field, opportunity to shape research, and develop a research community. Activities will include setting the context, exploring a provocation around design methods and policy making, mapping the terrain and developing a research agenda.

Designing with food

  • Date Sun, 26 June 2022 10:00 – 13:00 CEST
  • Organizer Isabel Urbano, Adele Orcajada
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Materials have supported and accompanied human evolution and the development of our society through the ages–from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, and into the Iron Age. Over time, material innovation has pushed boundaries–challenging making, manufacturing, and design. Today, material evolution is not aimed at simply producing more output, or a better aesthetic, rather it seeks to result in solutions that better connect us to the environment, to our communities and our heritage, and impact them in positive ways.

While food design explores concepts such as eating design, food space design, and food-related artifacts…in the joint hand-on making workshop by IED and Basque BioDesign Center, we aim to delve into food as an exciting, innovative source, as a raw material that designers can transform at the end of its life as human nourishment. We want to explore the value of what until now has been called Food Waste.

Affirmation excursion: Moving beyond surveys to unlock your stakeholders’ identities

  • Date day 1: Sun, 26 June 2022 14:00 – 15:30 CEST / day 2: Mon, 27 June 2022 09:00 – 10:30 CEST
  • Organizer William Nickley, Camille Snyder, Lauren McInroy, Elizabeth Sanders, Travis Scheadler
  • FORMAT face-to-face over two consecutive days

Participatory design centers stakeholders’ lived experiences during the co-creation of new products, services, systems, and policies. Affording stakeholders ways to share their personal identities can unlock a qualitative depth to participant contribution and more robust co-designed outcomes.

The aims of this two-part, highly interactive workshop are to inform future participatory design efforts as we: (1) introduce the feminist concepts of intersectionality, microaggression, and microaffirmation as they relate to personal identity and lived experiences; (2) engage in a novel multimedia journaling exercise centering personal identity within lived experience; then (3) challenge participants to synthesize their first-hand experiences; all while (4) participants enjoy workshop activities which ask them to depart physical/online conference venues and explore their surroundings during a reflexive “affirmation excursion.”

Phenomena: Co-designing planetary care through joy

  • Date Sun, 26 June 2022 15:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Ruth Isabel D. Guerra
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Many narratives about the future of our planet—whether through forecasting or science fiction—are often dystopian. Within this framework, fear becomes the catalyst for change. But how can we be certain that our solutions will lead to positive outcomes? PHENOMENA is a world-building tool and experience that approaches caring for our planet through the radical act of joy. This workshop fosters open collaboration within smaller, cross-disciplinary teams through participatory methods that situate play as central to the design process. The tool is intended to deeply humanize design thinking, establish meaningful connections with our planet, and democratize the pursuit of solving world problems.

Cybernetic lenses for designing and living in a complex world

  • Date Mon, 27 June 2022 08:00 – 12:00 CEST
  • Organizer Josh Andres, Alex Zafiroglu, Katherine Daniell, Paul Wong, Mina Henein, Xuanying Zhu, Ben Sweeting, Michael Arnold, Delia Pembrey Macnamara, Ariella Helfgott
  • FORMAT online

Our world is moving through a period of global crisis and change with the COVID-19 pandemic and increasingly extreme climate change-related events such as mega-fires and heatwaves while booming with technological innovation around AI-enabled systems. From this situation, we are learning about the fragility of the systems we live in. As such, considering alternative design research approaches to investigate, design and live in complex environments is vital for our future. 

In this hands-on half day workshop called “Cybernetic Lenses for Designing and Living in a Complex World” we introduce cybernetics and demonstrate its applicability to study complex relations between humans, non-humans, technology, and the environment in which they coexist to reveal opportunities that can steer us towards more positive futures. With this context, our goal is to provide theory about how to use the cybernetic lenses we present and follow with practical exercises so participants can explore and incorporate this design research approach into their practice.

Collaging pluralistic futures: a method to leverage creativity of uncommon wisdoms

  • Date Mon, 27 June 2022 15:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Marysol Ortega Pallanez, Silvana Juri, Sofía Bosch Gómez
  • FORMAT online

This online workshop proposes a future-visioning method using collage to assemble and explore alternative realities. This visioning method leverages the diverse histories of our territories, promoting a dialogue of wisdoms to decenter technocratic ‘one-world’ visions. As a result, participants will collectively deliberate and craft futures via a pluralistic approach.

The session involves group activities around three topics (food, human/nature relations, and political governance) where participants will go through a journey of recognising ‘uncommon’ pasts, amplifying and filtering presents, and re-assembling alternative realities.

This method will be of interest to practitioners/researchers interested in transformations, foresight, pluriversal or transition design as it constitutes a tool to transcend the status quo while advancing collective understanding and creativity through making.

Framing methods: Integrating play in design research

  • Date Mon, 27 June 2022 09:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Brooke Chornyak, Tania Allen
  • FORMAT face-to-face

The act of play — creating joyful, freeing situations and open-ended environments — can be a condition for richer, diverse viewpoints in the outset of design research. It’s not difficult to find designers that have long understood the role of play within the divergent phase of the creative process —  where fluid and flexible thinking is prized. This workshop is a playful call to step outside the boundaries of this conference into an unconventional space of exploration, wandering and joyful interactions. In this full-day, face to face event the landscape of Bilbao will ground our work and conversation on the use of play in design research. Participants will take part in one of the two structured “play experiments” we have created. The aim of both experiments is the same: Constructing an “Image of the City” derived from open-ended but structured exploration, a “challenge” and the production of a narrative map.

Commoning design and designing commoning

  • Date Mon, 27 June 2022 09:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Sanna Marttila, Giacomo Poderi, Joanna Saad-Sulonen, Andrea Botero
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Despite the ever-growing interest in commoning, the design research community still lacks a shared agenda to support the designing for and through relational commons. The one-day workshop offers a space to reflect on and explore connections between design(ing) and common(ing) while sharing practical or theoretical examples and experiences questioning:

  1. What perspectives and actions need to be foregrounded for new design research agendas that consider commoning and commons as a context and goal?
  2. What could be considered good strategies and practices for sustainable and enduring commoning and designing for commoning?
  3. What can design researchers, activists, and practitioners contribute to the common/commons, and how?
  4. How does commoning/designing changes when resources and assets are in common ”ownership”.

Urban lexicons

  • Date Mon, 27 June 2022 09:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Rosanna Vitiello, Diana Ibanez Lopez, Marcus Willcocks
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Urban Lexicons explores how we build relationships through the ways in which a city speaks to us and how we speak back as active participants within the city. Focusing on a deeper read of public spaces, it encourages a fluency of language and confidence (verbal, experiential and visual) in defining meaning among our city streets — if you can’t articulate why a space is important to you, you lack the power to claim space within the wider systems of regeneration within a city. Through our open source approach we offer tools to citizens and research practitioners to capture and communicate meaning in the spaces people value, and create tools that make their ‘voice’ and response known within that space as our cities evolve.

Design research methods on sexuality and intimacy

  • Date Mon, 27 June 2022 09:00 – 13:00 CEST
  • Organizer Joana Couto Silva, Ana Correia de Barros, Cristina Mendes Santos
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Whilst design research has often looked at health/wellbeing, there has been precious little research on sexual health. Research is even more scarce for some user groups, such as older adults, LGBTQI+ or clinical populations, whose sexual health needs are often perceived as taboo, being omitted due to embarrassment and stigma.

This workshop will build upon previous research and present new methods developed by the moderators in the context of a research project on sexual health called Anathema (https://anathemaproject.eu).

Attendees will be invited to experiment with new methods of answering key design research questions around breaking archetypes, designing educational and non-stigmatising content, designing experiments to test serendipity, and understanding the role of aesthetics in designing for sexual health.

Creating kom-union through rituals of biodesign

  • Date Mon, 27 June 2022 10:00 – 12:30 CEST
  • Organizer Adele Orcajada, Betiana Pavón
  • FORMAT face-to-face

What Biodesign means, its implications on consumer engagement, its impact on traditional design processes and the transformation of the material supply chain is still widely disputed by industry leaders trying to quantify what this means in terms of economy, carbon levels, or raw material consumption.

At the Basque BioDesign Center we will explore the qualitative experience of working with living organisms during the design process. We will immerse our participants in the sensorial world of bacterial cellulose, as well as bacteria, mycelium and algae. This immersive experience will allow participants to experience first-hand the implications of using living organisms as raw materials (and co-designers!) as a starting point for cutting edge, pioneering design that works in harmony with nature.

Awe Lab 3.0

  • Date Mon, 27 June 2022 10:00 – 17:00 CEST
  • Organizer Pod Bluman, Eva Kukar, Laura Ferrerello
  • FORMAT face-to-face

We believe that awe, i.e. a response to things that are perceived as vast and overwhelming and that alter the way we understand the world” (Keltner & Haidt 2003), is an incredibly powerful emotion and that its use as an agent of behaviour change is largely unrecognized.

How does experiencing awe affect behaviour? What opportunities for a new model of design for behaviour change lie at the heart of awe, wonder and transcendence? In this workshop, we will be exploring awe as an agent of behaviour change. We invite the DRS community to collectively explore what is known about the experience of awe and how it strengthens community relations, thus improving wellbeing and the emotional and empathic cohesion of people in society. As a participant, you will be looking at how we can harness the power of positive emotions and apply it to current and future social and environmental challenges through the lens of design. To further explore this potential, our group will share, gather data and subsequently map and visualize our experience of awe. 

Our motivation draws from developing practical strategies that address the big challenges in society and our environment. In our research practice, we’ve identified awe as uniquely positioned in relation to collective wellbeing, mental health and behaviour change.

Contributing actionable knowledge to design practice

  • Date Mon, 27 June 2022 14:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Marieke Zielhuis, Pieter Jan Stappers
  • FORMAT face-to-face

This workshop addresses the research-practice gap, a fundamental issue in design research. Despite efforts and intentions, design researchers struggle to make their projects more relevant for design professionals. In this workshop, we will share insights from our research in which we studied the value for design practice in collaborative research projects. We invite 8 – 10 participants with ample experience in such collaborations to further validate the model that we developed. Participants can be academic design researchers who have collaborated with design professionals in their projects, and professionals from design industry who have joined in research. By reflecting on their own experiences with the model, the participants acquire practical guidance to make their own projects more effective for design practice.

Gender and agency: Care as a facilitator towards alternative futures

  • Date Tue, 28 June 2022 09:00 – 13:00 CEST
  • Organizer Andrea Navarrete, Krity Gera
  • FORMAT online

The notion of ‘care’ represents a significant expanse of women’s lives that has remained unacknowledged and has been treated with contempt within the existing capitalist and patriarchal context. Moreover, it is predominantly associated with the home-based reproduction arena signifying oppression and is neglected as a capacity. This workshop intends to repurpose the language from the experiences of ‘care’ – from a feminist perspective – as an agency to critically inform theoretical and practical design discourse that operates on informal, bottom-up, citizen-centered practices and network-oriented participatory logic at a societal level. This workshop aims to bring together participants from different backgrounds to reflect upon their experiences and perceptions of ‘care’ through participatory design methods to develop a conceptual framework to guide alternative design approaches leading toward alternative futures.

Exploring the biophysical context

  • Date Tue, 28 June 2022 14:30 – 16:00 CEST
  • Organizer Pinar Ceyhan, Elisavet Christou, Violet Owen
  • FORMAT online

This virtual workshop aims to provide a space for participants to explore what the biophysical context is, how it can be approached and what it can offer to their own research and practice.

The biophysical context can be understood as the role and effects that a subject’s environmental surroundings can have on the subject’s different states of being (wellbeing, survival, evolution and development) (Figure 1). A subject’s environmental surroundings can include various environments such as the natural environment, built environment, social environment, economic environment, cultural environment, and the technological environment.

The transdisciplinary character of biophysics, like design, means that it can be applied within and across a broad range of disciplines and practices.

Biophysical concepts and approaches have been employed to understand a variety of phenomena across many different disciplines such as policy design (Mann & Absher, 2014; Sullivan & Meigh, 2007), community health management (Dunatuto et al., 2014), applied geography (Owen, Kench & Ford, 2016), forestry (Chang & Anderson, 2021; Wolf et al., 2021) agriculture (Atwell, Schulte & Westphal, 2009) and archaeology (Nelson et al., 2010). Exploring the biophysical context has the potential to reveal new ways for design researchers, practitioners, and students to meaningfully consider, understand and engage with the many ways in which environmental surroundings can affect a subject’s states of being.

My architect and I: A role-playing workshop to improve housing design service

  • Date Tue, 28 June 2022 09:00 – 10:30 CEST
  • Organizer Yaprak Hamarat, Çiğdem Yönder, Audrey Mertens, Catherine Elsen
  • FORMAT face-to-face

This role-playing workshop is dedicated to the interactions between architects and client-users in the specific context of residential architecture. The workshop is a 1.5-hour face-to-face activity organized with a collective introduction, conducted using the «1-2-4-8» technique and reaching a collective concluding moment. We aim to share, test, and evaluate the transferability of the tools co-designed by Belgian architects and client-users. We designed two role-playing kits (architects and clients-users) based on the qualitative data collected during two years. Each kit includes a user portray, a scenario with a problematic situation, a solution, and an evaluation framework. The players need to defend and respect the criteria and issues highlighted in the kit when debating and evaluating. The workshop offers a playful and dynamic activity.

Envision workshop: Multimodal research for design using machine learning

  • Date Tue, 28 June 2022 09:00 – 13:00 CEST
  • Organizer Joaquin Santuber, Babajide Owoyele, Wim Pouw, James Trujillo, Aleksandra Cwiek, Gerard de Melo, Jonathan A. Edelman
  • FORMAT hybrid

The Envision Workshop is part of the ongoing work of the Research2Impact group, studying design teams dynamics using computer-assisted analysis/methods. Building on insights from developing the opensource Envision Toolbox, we employ machine learning models developed in an interdisciplinary project to explore and make sense of the team dynamic patterns resulting from our «algorithms observing designers at work». In this workshop, together with participants, we want to make sense of and envision both the implications and opportunities of such automated approaches for design studies and practices. The Envision Workshop, like its predecessors, the Envision Bootcamp and Toolbox are a joint effort between the Center for Advanced Design Studies (Cfads), Donders Institute, Radboud University, and the Hasso-Plattner-Institute, University of Potsdam.

Utilizing eye-tracking technology in Design education

  • Date Tue, 28 June 2022 11:00 – 12:30 CEST
  • Organizer Bryan Howell, Addie Payne Morgan, Asa Jackson, Seth Christensen
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Design foundation courses strive to teach students the fundamental principles of visual composition in two and three-dimensional compositions. Teaching these skills has traditionally relied on finger pointing and verbal explanations. With the emergence of eye-tracking technology, the analogue (vague) visual journey lessons can be converted to live, recordable, digital (exact), eye scan paths. Instructors wearing eye-tracking glasses can project what they see “live” to students who see exactly what the instructor sees, and students can utilize inexpensive online eye tracking tools to quantifiably review the eye scan paths and fixations of their compositions. Workshop participants will experience both online and wearable eye-tracking technology in exercises and learn processes and terminology they can migrate to their own classrooms.

Please note that participants need to bring their own laptops.

Ideation and consequence scanning beyond human perspectives in biodesign

  • Date Tue, 28 June 2022 13:00 – 14:30 CEST
  • Organizer Sander Välk, Yuning Chen, Mimi Nguyen, Tuukka Toivonen, Celine Mougenot
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Biodesign is an emerging interdisciplinary field which is accelerated by recent advancements in biotechnology and engineering. The field offers novel opportunities to design innovative processes, products, services, materials and experiences. However, designing with the living and incorporating organisms into human-centric solutions raises critical questions about ethics, handling of species, human dominated power dynamics and exploitative behaviours.

The purpose of this workshop is to explore and discuss these critical questions from more than human perspectives and acknowledge biases in biodesign. The workshop offers an opportunity for this exploration through two interactive activities: firstly, biodesign idea generation with support from Design x Science cards, and secondly, consequence scanning – a guided activity that provides an opportunity to mitigate potential harms and innovate responsibly. An expected outcome of the workshop is shared understanding about potential implications of biodesign innovations on nonhuman collaborators. Participants can also expect to experience use of a novel creativity support tool for biodesign ideation.

This workshop is inviting participants with diverse backgrounds and interests (interdisciplinary ideation, bio-sciences, innovation, responsible design, multispecies ethics) with or without prior related experience). We aim to build a connected interdisciplinary community within DRS that can positively impact the emergence of responsible bioeconomy.

Anticipating the impact of design projects: contributions to the SDGs

  • Date Tue, 28 June 2022 14:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Catarina Lelis
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Designers and other creative professionals often receive several briefs simultaneously, having to prioritise or choose the one to work on at that moment. The tool that will be introduced and used in this workshop, The Impact Plan, is a supporting and defining framework for said decision, and 2) a system for reflecting on how each of the possible projects to choose from can become a more or less impactful, meaningful and pleasurable action. It does so by matching the projects’ anticipated impact with the motivations, capacities, ambitions, and perceptions of value of those involved in its execution, and finally matching all that with the UN’s 17 Goals for Sustainable Development, leading to, hopefully, some contribution to practice and research.

Making responsible design education happen

  • Date Tue, 28 June 2022 15:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Joanna Boehnert, Matt Sinclair, Marianna J. Coulentianos
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Responsible Design reframes the social and ecological consequences, boundaries and agencies of design in ways that allow designers to address complex eco-social problems. This expansive approach asks learners to consider the unintended social and environmental consequences of what designers propose and do. Despite its potential, Responsible Design education faces significant challenges in shifting institutional priorities in Design Schools. The Responsible Design Research Group (RDRG) at Loughborough University has established six principles which we attempt to embed in our research, teaching and practice. Ensuring such principles are foundational in teaching, rather than subsidiary or optional is the focus of this workshop. The half-day workshop will include a participatory mapping session and will be part of a larger research project. 

The Legal Design impact: spreading seeds for a common framework

  • Date Wed, 29 June 2022 14:30 – 16:00 CEST
  • Organizer Lorenzo Zorzi, Marco Imperiale
  • FORMAT online

The concepts of simplification, accessibility, and transparency, which are among the main characteristics of legal design, are directly related to the 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Goals of the United Nations. For this reason, we can argue that legal design is a discipline that fosters sustainability and produces a positive impact on the world.

But can we measure this kind of impact? Can the (legal) design thinking process and its human-centered approach helping us measuring the impact of legal design? Can we quantify the impact in terms of kpi and roi?

These are the questions that we want to address in our workshop.

Guiding the PhD in Design – Exchanging experiences about outcomes & approaches

  • Date Wed, 29 June 2022 11:30 – 14:00 CEST
  • Organizer Annemiek van Boeijen, Lucia Rampino, Francesca Mattioli
  • FORMAT online

In this 90-minute online workshop (Zoom and Miro) we will exchange the various approaches and outcomes of PhDs in Design. The workshop builds on the Conversation ‘Guiding the PhD in Design – Experiences from Six Programmes’ and the shared Map & Glossary, resulting from a cooperation between six institutes in six different countries. We start from an overview of examples, ‘Representations of a PhD in Design. Together we will: 1. share opinions and gain insights in the broad variety of the possible outcomes of a PhD in Design; 2. ; 3. have a better understanding of what a PhD in Design entails; 4. Identify strength and weaknesses of the proposed Representation format.

Participatory ecological storytelling

  • Date Wed, 29 June 2022 09:00 – 15:00 CEST
  • Organizer Elise Talgorn
  • FORMAT face-to-face

There is still too little urgency and emotional engagement around environmental issues. The difficulty is that the associated risks and challenges are often abstract and unrelatable. We use the persuasive and transformative potential of storytelling and explore how it can nurture a new sense of relationship with the environment. In this workshop, we guide participants to co-create narratives expressing different perspectives through characters carrying the ‘voice of the Planet’ (e.g., human protagonists, mythical entities, anthropomorphized animals). With practical exercises participants learn basic storytelling theory – building profound personas and compelling story arcs. We reflect on the impact of the story creation process on their emotions, perception, and motivation towards pro-environmental behavior, and on potential applications of ecological storytelling in their field. 

Co-design: what are you really getting out of it?

  • Date Wed, 29 June 2022 14:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Niki Wallace, Aaron Davi2, Ian Gwilt, Joe Langley
  • FORMAT hybrid

This workshop will explore the value of participating in co-design activities. It will invite participation in generative processes that provoke thought and action, exploring what it means to participate, and examining the different forms of value that can be generated through participatory processes. We will explore the tension between practitioners’ recognition of the significant social value that is generated through participation in co-design processes, and the default of participation being measured through control over decisions. We explore three core provocations: (1) what is the “value” for different participants and how might this be captured? (2) what benefits of co-design are not captured in current forms of evaluation?, and (3) what is stopping us from adopting different forms of evaluation processes?

Black mirror brainstorming: Centering ethics and identifying harm in Design

  • Date Thu, 30 June 2022 11:30 – 13:00 CEST
  • Organizer Lexi Namer, Elyse Girard
  • FORMAT online

Designers have a power and responsibility to create products that do no harm, yet most are not taught to ask if the products they are designing could be used in a harmful way. There is an opportunity for designers to move towards a culture of ethical-centered design and create products that are safe and free from harm. This online workshop is for anyone interested in design ethics to collaborate, discuss, and speculate on ethical issues across design. It will involve working in breakout groups to do a modified Black Mirror Brainstorm in order to understand how a design could be harmful and to practice centering ethics as part of the creative design process.

Evaluation Visualisation Design (EViD) Tool: A novel tool to help you explore and design your project's evaluation activities

  • Date Thu, 30 June 2022 09:30 – 11:00 CEST
  • Organizer Adrian Gradinar, Elisavet Christou, Pınar Ceyhan, Philip Ely
  • FORMAT online

This workshop presents a novel Evaluation Visualisation Design (EViD) tool which exists in two formats: an open access online tool based on Miro and an open access physical tool in .pdf format that can be downloaded and printed. EViD is the evolution of The Percent Evaluation Method which was presented as a workshop at DRS2020 under the title “Embedding Evaluation into Research Projects – The Percent Evaluation Method”. EViD is a collaboration between design researchers at ImaginationLancaster at Lancaster University, UK, and the School of Design and the Built Environment at Curtin University, Australia. The tool is for people who wish to explore notions of evaluation in research and to design evaluation activities for a particular project. EViD, guides users through the process of exploring their project’s evaluation potential and needs, and evaluation activities that can help evidence a project’s value through aspects such as impact, knowledge, learning and change.

Mindscape: Visualizing the Landscape of the Mind

  • Date Thu, 30 June 2022 09:00 – 13:00 CEST
  • Organizer Chao Ying Qin, Julia Griffiths
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Mindscape is an interactive method and graphic mapping tool that offers, through its unique design, an exploration into the construction of our thoughts. When we stand on top of a mountain, the landscape’s expanse is spread out before us: hills, valleys, rivers, and lakes. Similarly, a Mindscape is a snapshot of our inner-world, providing a conceptual map in order to see into our thinking process. As a workshop, what Mindscape offers is threefold. The theory and philosophy of the project are first introduced in a PowerPoint presentation and online platform (mindscape.world). Next, the technique of Mindscape is brought to life through a hands-on interactive and embodied group process developed out of drama therapy practices. After participants leave the workshop, the Mindscape created and played out during the workshop will be digitally rendered back into an online format to serve as an archived stand-alone art piece that can be accessible for participants to visit and engage with after their workshop is completed.

Designing AI for home wellbeing world cafe

  • Date Thu, 30 June 2022 09:00 – 13:00 CEST
  • Organizer Emily Corrigan-Kavanagh, Chris Parker
  • FORMAT face-to-face

‘Designing AI for Home Wellbeing’ could radically change the way designers develop AI interactions for the home while providing a concrete focus to develop context-specific frameworks which designers can later expand into other settings.

This workshop will explore ‘Designing AI for Home Wellbeing’ using the ‘World Café’ format. By answering focused questions, we will foster interactive group conversations to explore design’s role in AI for Home Wellbeing and how design can overcome the barriers to implementation. Ultimately, we will form a new Special Interest Group (SIG) community.

Attendee contributions will inform a final report defining what ‘Designing AI for Home Wellbeing’ is and how we can collaboratively support each other in creating user-centred design across disciplines and stakeholders.

Design-driven foresight: Tensions and typologies

  • Date Thu, 30 June 2022 14:00 – 19:00 CEST
  • Organizer Sune Gudiksen, Rike Neuhoff, Luca Simeone, Rui Patricio
  • FORMAT hybrid

This workshop seeks to create a dialogue space in which there is a deliberate intention to explore tensions that are at play in design-driven foresight processes, i.e. those approaches that combine design and foresight methods and approaches. As designers and design researchers, when engaging others in engaging in foresight activities, we are operating within a space that is characterized by multiple tensions. The workshop will focus on five of these: (1) Process vs. Outcome, (2) What vs. How, (3) Plausible vs. Preferred, (4) Intra and Interpersonal relations, and (5) Internal vs. External stakeholders. The workshop will explore these fives tensions and ways to balance them through the lenses of the workshop participants and with a focus on drafting together typologies.

ReModelling futures – Guiding practices of transformation through a participatory design framework

  • Date Thu, 30 June 2022 15:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Dilys Williams, Naomi Bulliard, Laetitia Forst
  • FORMAT face-to-face

This workshop supports designers and design researchers in the integration of a broad and radical sustainability agenda within their creative process initiating transformative product service system concepts.

In this practice-based workshop using participatory methods and speculative scenario building, participants will move beyond design within set contexts, to design of contexts as a dynamic framework, exploring ways to build resilience in the face of uncertainty. Participants will first imagine future scenarios, to then draft concepts for product service systems that contribute to co-existence in ecological, social, economic and cultural terms. This workshop coincides with the launch of the open access tool and guidebook, created and refined with designers across scales and locations, which are key outcomes of a 2-year research project.

Designing the circular design team

  • Date Thu, 30 June 2022 14:00 – 17:00 CEST
  • Organizer Rebecca Earley, Rosie Hornbuckle, Marion Real, Cathryn Hall Barcelona
  • FORMAT hybrid

This hybrid workshop aims to model diverse and inclusive stakeholder partnerships for circular economy challenges, where design will play a central role in visioning, convening and supporting multi-skill teams, who are each focused on utilizing a different, local waste stream. Drawing on a specific, developed case study of Laxta Wool within the region of Bilbao, and with materials in our hands, we will invite participants to reflect on their own role as designers, researchers, citizens and stakeholders in regional material flows, value retention and creation. Together we will co-design Circular Design Teams to address the challenges and interconnections of transforming food-, agricultural-, textiles-, and construction- waste into valuable local resources.

Activated city - Rethinking urban possibilities

  • Date Fri, 1 July 2022 09:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Johnny Friberg, Pontus Johansson
  • FORMAT face-to-face

The workshop focuses on design for play in urban space, emphasizing how cities can be more inclusive for different groups of people and especially children. By hands-on workshops in public spaces, we aim to modify and change/add to existing structures not usually utilized for play, such as benches, fences, lights and trashcans etc. We want to create not only a better environment but also highlight questions such as “who owns the city”. In this workshop we focus on children as citizens and inhabitants in the city.  By a workshop in public space we will analyze a public space and then ”hack” and change/add to existing structures.  Together we will discuss, sketch and build/visualize contributions for a more playful city.

Designing reservist cells in time of crisis

  • Date Fri, 1 July 2022 11:30 – 13:00 CEST
  • Organizer Marion Real, Mariana Quintero, Guillem Camprodon
  • FORMAT online

Recent situations have illustrated the need for a more resilient population in times of crisis. In this workshop we introduce the concept of Reservist cells as a network of stakeholders ready to act when emergencies are declared and we invite the audience to envision together what would be the configurations of such networks through diverse emergency crises. As part of the Reservist project, the team of Fab Lab Barcelona will guide the participants to play with a customized version of the Atlas of Weak Signals tool. This short online workshop will be a co-creation playground for designers who want to explore emergent futures and debate on new forms of design research that can foster glocal resilience.

Materializing bodily relations to data worlds through knotting

  • Date Fri, 1 July 2022 10:00 – 16:00 CEST
  • Organizer Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Lara Reime, Marisa Cohn, Tania Pérez-Bustos
  • FORMAT face-to-face

This workshop invites participants to explore, individually and collectively, how materializations of data traces can be used to reflect upon bodily relations to data worlds of which we are part. We will re-engage with bodily data through knotting, which has historically been a means for representing data, such as in the Quipu, used as a data storage and archiving device. Through such data materializations we aim to surface qualities of scale, intimacy, and temporality within bodily relations to data, during the (post) pandemic era. By drawing attention to the affective labour of making data, we will explore how a change in material form from data visualization to knotting with threads can bring forward labour and intimacies, that otherwise stay invisible.

Website workshop

Configuring idiotic virtual agents through a scenario-building kit

  • Date Fri, 1 July 2022 09:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Maria Tsilogianni
  • FORMAT online

Drawing on concerns related to domestic Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs)—privacy invasion, data extraction, limited interactions—, this workshop addresses alternative approaches to the design of such technologies. It explores how creative and open-ended design processes involving multidisciplinary designers, rather than solely tech experts, might accommodate more inclusive human-computer interactions. These are questioning intelligence and strict classifications of agency within the human-machine relationship as established by market-driven objectives. Through participatory speculation focused on scenario-building, it invites designers’ creativity and imagination in refiguring human-IPA encounters beyond corporate and generic design standards. A speculative kit comprised of playful, open-ended tasks prompts participants to engage primarily through imagination, thus bringing more creativity in the design process and expanding human-IPA entanglements beyond automated functionality.

Fables for imagining: Critical storymaking and digital literacies

  • Date Fri, 1 July 2022 15:00 – 18:00 CEST
  • Organizer Gillian Russell, Frederik Lesage, Craig Badke
  • FORMAT hybrid

Fables are one of humanity’s oldest forms of storytelling; sharing tales of moral inquiry and caution through archetypal characters to build shared wisdom, interrogate power, and navigate societal roles and responsibilities.

Fables for Imagining explores how this form of storymaking can be used to interrogate our contemporary collective behaviours and modes of existence with a specific focus on questions of civility in a post-digital world.

Responding to the impacts of accelerating technology, connectivity, and a rapidly changing social environment, this workshop leads participants to develop a series of techno-social fables designed to draw out the radical ways digital technologies are reshaping our world, while building a collective imagination for our future selves and society.

Plumbing the Machine Learning Pipeline: how Constraints affect our Good Intentions

  • Date Wed 29 June, 9:00-13:00 CEST
  • Organizer Mireia Yurrita Semperena, Jacob Browne, Natalia-Rozalia Avlona, Pamela Gil Salas
  • FORMAT face-to-face

In this workshop, participants will experience the constraints and contextual conditionings during the decision-making process in which AI systems are developed. Through a gamified approach, participants will play a character with specific motivations in a fictional Machine Learning design scenario. In the first stage of this game, they will simulate the decision-making process for developing an image classification system. In the second stage, they will reflect on the practices in industry and how values are embedded in the production of these systems.

The frameboard sessions: Generating and exploring multiple frames with non-designers

  • Date Wed 29 June, 16:00-17:30
  • Organizer Guido Stompff
  • FORMAT face-to-face

Designers and researchers often act as facilitators in co-design processes. Framing is a pivotal step, offering guidance for subsequent activities even when much is unknown. Designers are trained in (re-) framing, but for non-designers it proved to be difficult. In this workshop a method is presented that was developed since 2017 to facilitate groups of non-designers to co-develop inspiring frames, regardless it is in a business, a social or educational context. A dedicated tool, a frameboard, allows groups of non-designers to rapidly explore and evaluate possible frames. In the workshop, a shorter version of a frameboard session, you will experience such a session, working on a challenge. First,  possible frames are generated and subsequently several (chosen) frames are explored and evaluated for their practical value. Materials can be used freely.

Next DRS Labs