Paper ‘Positioning design in transdisciplinary collaborations: Experiences from a smart city consortium project’ presented at DRS 2022 conference

From June 25th – July 3rd, the global Design Research Society (DRS) bi-annual conference took place in Bilbao, Spain. Anouk participated in this event and presented her paper ‘Positioning design in transdisciplinary collaborations: Experiences from a smart city consortium project’ during the Design Methods and Transdisciplinary Practices track. It was a real pleasure to finally meet and engage with the design research community in person!
The main insights presented in this paper regard the role that design research can take in transdisciplinary collaborations. We suggest 5 roles that design contributes in these settings: 1) Generator, 2) Communicator, 3) Facilitator, 4) Mediator and 5) Provocateur. These roles grow in complexity, and we argue that the mediator and provocateur are the most relevant, yet challenging in transdisciplinary settings. To truly embrace these roles, it is important that design research integrates insights and sensitivities coming from other connected fields such as ethics and politics of technologies. – Which is exactly what we are trying to implement in our research project!
If you are interested in knowing more about this, have a look at the paper that Anouk Geenen presented at the DRS 2022 Conference in Bilbao in July 2022. Congratulations, Anouk, on this inspiring and thought provoking paper!

https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2022/researchpapers/272/