EcoLabs

The Design Research Society's biannual conference in Boston #DRS2024 was a glimpse of what I hoped design research might one day become when I attended my first DRS conference in 2010 in Montreal. The programme was full of ideas and practices for designing for social, ecological, pluriversal, decolonising agendas with diverse design strategies across craft, UX, data visualisation, policy design and more. With "futures" as the most popular keyword, a large portion of this community is oriented towards making visions of regenerative and equitable futures possible. This work is a direction change in design research. The need for this change could not be greater as we witness the rise of authoritarian governance in the USA (with recent ruling by the Supreme Court) and other countries. While there are areas where I believe much of the community is insufficiently critically engaged – with the practices that will enable ecological transitions and the risks associated with AI (especially the climate consequences) being the most critical, the DRS is definitely moving in the right direction. As a chair of the #Transition track, I will have more to say in our conversation editorial next month. For now, this was a great conference and I thank the teams at Northeastern University and DRS2024 Boston for making it possible, along with all paper, workshop, and conversations presentations, track chairs and reviewers. Photos from some of my favourites keynotes and presentations below (apologies for not linking to the dozens of people involved with all this content) – and the buildings we occupied. For more on the topic check out the conference proceedings, the new DRS journal "Designing", the upcoming DRS education conference, and the membership link. https://lnkd.in/eyYfK6Bn

The new 2nd Ed. Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design now online for pre-ordering. I have two chapters in the new edition. The first is "Ecological Theory in Design: Participant Designers in an Age of Entanglement". This ecological theory is a basic foundation for sustainable transitions in design. The second chapter is a practical contribution to design education called "Design Ecologies Exercise: The Innovation Landscape Matrix" co-authored with Emma Dewberry and Matt Sinclair. These are just two of 47 contributions that are all a basis for new ways of understanding and practicing design in response to the ecological emergencies. Congratulations to editor Rachel Beth Egenhoefer for this massive achievement. https://lnkd.in/eGBHRH54

EVENT: Evan Thompson and Bruce Clarke in conversation with Dulmini Perera Mind, Ecology, Enaction: Encounters between Gregory Bateson and Francisco Varela. Online Feb 10, 2024 17:00 BST In this conversation, we explore the relationships between Gregory Bateson and Francisco Varela’s work, particularly the ways in which their work contributed to expanding our understanding of the ‘mind’ in the context of living. Starting from their time at Lindisfarne Association in the 1970s, a context that had multiple relationships to their intellectual projects, we will explore how they reformulated concepts such as wholes, boundaries, and recursion in their respective critiques of mainstream Western science/epistemology. The discussion would end with a focus on action. How does their expansion of the notions of ‘cognition’, ‘mind’, and consciousness’ enable us to think about (design) action within the context of the present ecological crises?  EVENT - https://lnkd.in/e398XUMR Zoom sign up: https://lnkd.in/ewjkupxM