Nordic Design Research society conferences, 2005, 2007, 2009 and 2011



Nordes – Nordic Design Research – is an open network that organizes a bi-annual conference and summer school, and it promotes the publication and dissemination of design research through its digital archive.

My role
I have been involved in Nordes since its inception at the first Nordic Design Research Conference in Copenhagen in 2005, for which I was on the program committee and responsible for proceedings. I have since been involved in many capacities, currently I am a member of the Nordes board. My engagement with Nordes is an expression of my committment to developing the quality of design research and, crucially, to expanding the arenas for critical discourse and for diversity within the field.

Together with Ben Matthews, I was program co-chair for the 2011 Nordes conference 'Making Design Matter'. Nordes'11 was hosted by Aalto University in Helsinki, with Ilpo Koskinen as general conference chair and Tiina Härkäsalmi as local chair. As program co-chair, I was responsible for the review process and conference program, and I took primary responsibility for the latter. The program was carefully designed to increase the discourse within the conference. In relation to the overall conference theme, I set daily subthemes and session themes. Organized thematically, sessions mixed disciplinary and national perspectives, and were prepared with session chairs to include and faciliate extensive discussions across the paper presentations. Special sessions focused on issues of practice, such as one focused on design cases and another on the design profession. I moderated a closing panel of young research leaders invited to raise new issues for further developing the Nordes community. How the conference program and motivations behind are explained in the introduction to the conference

The conference theme and program are further elaborated in the introduction to the conference proceedings. Excerpt: "The format for sessions within the conference is explicitly crafted towards encouraging discussion – in addition to presentations by authors, each session is timed to end with some time for an interactive discussion among all the authors, to be moderated by the session chair. We believe that such opportunities for discourse is one of the unique possibilities for those choosing to publish and to contribute to conferences. It is also important for all of us who are here building academic quality and community within the Nordic countries. This explicit commitment to the discursive component of the conference has required extra effort on behalf of authors and chairs, and we hope that it produces a rewarding and ongoing dialogue. We have developed some experimental formats for the breaks as well, which we hope will support the social part of the programme as well as start to build relations and potentially themes to take up in future venues."

Image (above)
Graphic identity for Nordes'11 by Tatu Marttila

More about the society and conferences
www.nordes.org
Nordes'11 Making Design Matter


See also

/ Publications / Koskinen, I., Härkäsalmi, T., Lee, J-J., Mazé, R., and Matthews, B. (eds) (2011) Proceedings of the Nordic Design Research Conference.

/ Publications / Binder, T., Gall Grogh, P., Redström, J., and Mazé, R. (eds) (2005) Proceedings of the Nordic Design Research Conference.