Nordic Design Research Conference

I attended the 5th Nordes Design Research conference last week at Aalto university in Helsinki . The theme for this years conference was “Making Design Matter!”. This was a very interesting conference and provided me with some insight into the quality and direction of design research across Nordic countries.

I gave a presentation titled “Integrating sustainability in a regional design sector” based on a short exploratory paper I wrote a number of months ago. The paper provided some analysis and insight on experiences of setting up E:DN. The audience for the paper was predominantly policy makers and was informed by my wider PhD research.

The presenters at the conference were a mix of PhD researchers, post-doctorate design educators and professors. What became clear over the two days that emerging themes were social innovation, co-creation, service design and sustainability (my bias).

Some of the key take-home reflections for me was the need to increase the quality of design research, the dilemma of incrementalism, the importance but inconsistency in interdisciplinary research and the language of communities.