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Creating platforms and resources for dialogue

Posted on 8 April 2016

I have just returned from Maternity Leave (July 2015 to April 2016), and so over the last few months the fellowship work has been formally paused, although there are still a number of developments and impact activities to highlight. 

In collaboration with the other members of the RTD Conference steering committee (Jayne Wallace, Joyce Yee, John Vines), I  developed a conference series website: www.researchthroughdesign.org. This site aims to serve a burgeoning RTD community of design researchers and practitioners, providing information about future conference events, documentation about past ones, and news and related outputs of potential interest to the community.

We’ve also recently published a piece in a special issue about ‘Composing Conferences’; this piece was a critical reflective account by the RTD 2015 chairs on our experiences of running the conference and developing its features, and it also documented our transferrable learnings for future iterations of the RTD conference or related events.

We’re also currently guest editing a special issue of Design Issues about RTD 2015, which will comprise extended papers about work in the conference programme and reflective commentaries from attendees about their conference experiences.

In other news, along with colleagues on the EPSRC CDL project team, I developed a ‘picture book’ that captures key project findings in a compelling form, intended to engage a broad range of the project stakeholders in research impact activities.  We then evaluated the efficacy of this ‘picture book’ as a resource for dialogue, and describe our findings in a forthcoming paper at the Design Research Society (DRS) conference 2016.

The figure above shows our use of sequential art in the picture book design to communicate empirical findings from the CDL project.