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A New Year, Full Steam Ahead
In this first edition of Mind Design in 2009, director Dorthe Mejlhede takes stock of the activities in 2008 and looks forward to an exciting year for the Danish Centre for Design Research. Many activities are already on the drawing board and the admission of another class of Master in Design students is imminent.
20 January 2009

Design Is Important for Democracy
The Norwegian professor Liv Merete Nielsen is an external member of the steering committee of the Danish Centre for Design Research. In her work, she focuses on user-involvement in design processes and in ways for children and young people to train their visual literacy skills in school to help them become full-fledged participants in democracy.
20 January 2009

Copyright Law Protects Design
Copyright law protects designers’ original works from plagiarism. But in order to claim their copyright, designers have to update and save their drafts so that they can later document when a design was created.
20 January 2009

Master’s Programme Gives Designers a New Language
The Master’s Programme in Design gives the designers added qualifications in relation to theory and method, thus enabling them to meet the ever steeper demands from businesses. In September 2009, a new team embarks on the programme, which is organised as part-time studies over a period of two years.
18 February 2009

The Tacit Knowledge of Artefacts
The design process is often said to contain tacit knowledge, which is also an integral aspect of the resulting design product. But can we narrow down the nature of this tacit knowledge? How might it be described, and how does it affect the way in which we perceive and develop design? Anders Brix, a professor in the design department at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, shares his thoughts on this issue.
18 February 2009

Strategic Design: Achieving Utopian Goals
Strategic DesignCompanies can use strategic design to discover and develop new business opportunities. Strategic design has a great potential and should be incorporated into both education and research, says one of the researchers under the Danish Centre for Design Research.
18 February 2009

Challenges Facing the Design Industry
Strategic DesignThe design industry has to remain flexible and innovative in order to meet the challenges that follow from global and technological developments. Among other things, design should be used strategically, and small agencies in particular will have to engage in interdisciplinary collaboration, say Anna Kirah, Vice President and Design Consultant at CPH Design and Gitte Just, Managing Director for Danish Design Association.
16 March 2009

The Story Gives Fashion Products Added Value
FashionOn 3 February 2009, Marie Riegels Melchior defended her Ph.D. dissertation 'Dansk på mode! En undersøgelse af design, identitet og historie i dansk modeindustri' (Danish in fashion! An examination of design, identity and the history of the Danish fashion industry). She believes that the Danish fashion industry has a development potential that the design education programmes can help bring out by giving future fashion designers greater knowledge of theory and history.
16 March 2009

A New Platform for the Design of Office Environments
Designing office environments is often a tough challenge. Architect and company need to agree, and user desires and needs have to be taken into consideration. In a new Ph.D. dissertation, 'Med mennesker i rammen – dialogorienteret registrering af rum og aktivitet i kontormiljøer' (Including the user – dialogue-oriented registration of space and activity in office environments), architect Sidse Grangaard has developed a series of instruments for analysing user needs so that they can be included in the design process.
16 March 2009

Strategic Design Tools
Strategic DesignWorking strategically with design is something that many companies do but rarely talk about. With her Ph.D. dissertation 'Designs strategiske potentiale – Design i virksomheders værdiskabelse' (The Strategic Potential of Design – Design in Companies’ Value Creation), architect Irene Lønne makes a contribution to the conceptualisation of strategic design. She offers a set of research-based ideas for anchoring design strategically in companies and thus making it a key element in value creation.
16 April 2009

Artistic Design Development as a Driving Force for Research
The experimental dimension in artistic design development work provides both knowledge and inspiration for design research. Poul Rind Christensen, new head of research at Designskolen Kolding, wants to create a closer interaction between research and artistic experimentation in order to strengthen what he calls development-driven research.
16 April 2009

Design Belongs in the Business Pages
Design carries great economic importance for companies, but in the press, design stories are usually placed in the culture pages. Finnish research has documented the benefits to design of being treated as business news by the media – and increasingly, the media tend to do so, including the Danish media.
16 April 2009

Design Researchers Seeing Ghosts
The development of methods for spotting new connections and possible solutions is an essential aspect of design research. Often, this occurs in a productive exchange with other knowledge fields. One setting for this sort of open, unfettered and interdisciplinary discussion of ideas is the Nordic Summer University, where design researchers are involved in several of the eight study circles. The latest seminar, which was held in Iceland, addressed the ghosts that haunt modern culture.
15 May 2009

Immaterial Labour Poses New Challenges for Architecture
A growing segment of the populations in industrialised Western societies is no longer engaged in the manufacture of physical products but instead create immaterial values such as services, cultural experiences and media products. What does this development mean for architecture, which creates the physical workplace setting? That is one of the issues addressed in M.Eng. Andreas Rumpfhuber’s Ph.D. dissertation Architektur immaterieller Arbeit (Architecture of Immaterial Labour), which he defended at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture on 20 April 2009.
15 May 2009

Society Benefits from the Commercialisation of Research
Design Research in CompaniesNew knowledge from research should be used to benefit business and society. That is the idea behind Aalborg University’s initiative to match researchers and their good ideas with companies that are able to exploit the ideas commercially and thus create new jobs.
15 May 2009

The Oil of the 21st Century
The creative industry needs to develop a better grasp of legal design protection, as businesses’ product rights are growing increasingly important. That was one of the points made at the conference Udfordringer for designbeskyttelsen i det 21. århundrede (Challenges for Design Protection in the 21st Century). Here, designers and lawyers discussed the importance of Danish legislation to support innovative and creative efforts in companies.
15 June 2009

The Chair is More Than Just Seating Furniture
FurnitureIn August 2009, Danish publisher Gyldendal releases the new book “Design: Stolen” (Design: The Chair), which offers a broad perspective on chair design with particular emphasis on the past 150 years. It is essential to convey design research to the general public, say the editors: Lars Dybdahl, associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, and Ida Engholm, associate research professor at the Danish Centre for Design Research. In the book, they have gathered contributions from several Danish design researchers within ten topics focused on the chair and its design.
15 June 2009

Milan Furniture Fair: Feeling the Pulse
FurnitureOnce a year, everything in Milan in Italy is about furniture and design as the city hosts one of the world’s biggest furniture fairs. In April 2009, Pernille Stockmarr, a Ph.D. scholar at the Danish Centre for Design Research, and Nicolai de Gier, an associate professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, took part in the event. In this article, they discuss what they as researchers gained from visiting the Milan Furniture Fair.
15 June 2009

Design Theory Under Debate
The annual research rally for the researchers associated with the Danish Centre for Design Research helps consolidate and develop the Danish design research environment. This year’s theme was the nature of design theory and the significance of theory for a practice-based field such as design. The debate among the design researchers was enriched with interesting and inspiring contributions from Professor Richard Buchanan from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio and Associate Professor Daniel Fällman from Umeå University, Sweden.
16 September 2009

Building Knowledge Based on Design Practice
The two-year part-time Master’s Programme in Design enrolled its first class in 2005. June 2009 saw the graduation of the second class: 18 new masters of design. With their dissertations, the graduates help heighten the academic qualifications of the design profession, says one of the external examiners at the recent final oral examination, Professor Halina Dunin-Woyseth. Many of the dissertations spring from design practice and use academic tools to enrich and explain the understanding of practice.
16 September 2009

American Design Researcher: Danish Design Research has Great Potential
Denmark has a great potential for building a powerful design research environment that would ensure design research a central position in national development, says one of the world’s leading design researchers, Professor Richard Buchanan of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He visited Denmark in late August to speak at the annual Danish Centre for Design Research’s research rally and to take a closer look at developments within the fields of design and design research in Denmark. He believes that the strong Danish design culture can be expanded to new arenas both in Denmark and abroad.
16 September 2009

Research Through Design in Sport Science
One of the research methods applied in the practice-based design research environment is research through design. Martin Ludvigsen, a design researcher at Aarhus School of Architecture, is using the method to develop new technology for elite sports training in the interdisciplinary project iSport, which also involves computer scientists, sport scientists and a number of private companies. The method can prove particularly useful for designers in their practical efforts to develop future products.
20 October 2009

Crisis May Force Companies to Develop
Design Research in CompaniesOverall, crises generate growth because they force companies to develop, says Tore Kristensen, professor of strategic design at the Copenhagen Business School. He points out that design research may facilitate the development efforts that some companies initiate in response to the crisis in order to optimise their products and processes and, not least, to get to the core of the company’s strategy and effort. A survey from the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation shows that one in seven companies expects to increase its development efforts despite the current crisis, although the total volume of Danish companies’ research and development activities is expected to decline in 2009 in response to the crisis.
20 October 2009

Webmuseum 2.0
In September, Webmuseum.dk was launched in a beta version – providing access to a comprehensive collection of websites. The museum is probably the world’s first web-based museum to feature the historical development of the graphic World Wide Web through curated exhibitions of websites. In Webmuseum.dk the users can put together their own personal website exhibitions. Associate Research Professor Ida Engholm of the Danish Centre for Design Research is the initiator of Webmuseum.dk, which was developed with external funding under the auspices of the DCDR as a research dissemination project.
20 October 2009

Our Glocal Future
Society, Innovation and environmentHow can design research help promote environmental sustainability? Ezio Manzini, a professor at Politecnico di Milano, points to the possibility of working with scenarios for future development. The scenarios may generate specific ideas for new solutions. At the same time, on a methodological level, this work contributes to developing the use of scenarios as a design-specific tool that can be used to identify and discuss possibilities that have not yet been realised.
17 November 2009

User-Involvement Leads to More Sustainable Waste Management
Society, Innovation and environmentWe are drowning in garbage. But more than 80 percent of the household waste that is incinerated today could be recycled if it were sorted correctly. Together with the waste management firm Vestforbrænding, Danish design researchers are exploring new ways to improve waste sorting and recycling. In a pilot project associated with the DAIM project, Design-Anthropological Innovation Model, at The Danish Design School, design researchers have accompanied garbage collectors on their routes in order to develop a better understanding of user needs. Experiences gained in the project have already led to improvements in many of Vestforbrænding’s processes and procedures and will be made available to other companies.
17 November 2009

Design Researchers Want to Turn Danes on to Electric Cars
Society, Innovation and environmentWhen the environmentally friendly electric cars are ready to roll out onto Danish roads in less than two years, drivers should see them as an offer they can’t refuse. Design researchers at Designskolen Kolding, Denmark, will do their bit to bring this about. With support from Dong Energy, the Danish Enterprise and Construction Agency and others, they have launched the etrans project, which draws on user-driven innovation to help make the electric car a commercial success and thus an environmental success.
17 November 2009

A Research Journey Through the World of Computer Games
On 12 November 2009, Alessandro Canossa of The Danish Design School successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation 'Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games.' In the dissertation he seeks to analyse and answer the question of how to create attractive computer game experiences. He constructs the term play-persona as a tool for uncovering patterns in player behaviour and uses visualisations to make his analysis useful to game-designers in practice.
15 December 2009

Design as a Form of Knowledge
The relationship between design and knowledge was the topic of a large-scale design research conference organised by the German society for design theory and research, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Designtheorie und -forschung, this October in Berlin. Design offers new ways of knowing and of producing knowledge, and one of the key messages at the conference was that design research can contribute to our understanding of design as a source of knowledge production.
15 December 2009

The Designer as Trickster
Design Research in CompaniesIn her anthropological research project on designer roles, anthropologist and management researcher Karen Lisa Salamon looks at the designer’s role as a trickster. With their unconventional approach to the design process, tricksters provide the change and renewal that are so crucial to our society, says Karen Lisa Salamon. The Danish newspaper Politiken’s editor of design, Søren Nyeland, says that Karen Lisa Salamon’s research adds a new perspective to designers’ perception of their own role. He and the other designers at Politiken often act as tricksters in the creative process.
15 December 2009