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What if a window blind is no longer available immediately but has to be grown at home? Imagine, the kitchen floor is covered in a mix of seeds and soil and is sprinkled with water when needed. Every step through the kitchen is taken with utmost care until the grass is dense enough. Then the grass is cut for breakfast juice and the grassy carpet pulled out of the house for a thorough wash. A diverse set of householders engage in making sense and making a mark by adding their craft through embroidering and crocheting. Finally, the new window blind is installed. For how long do you think it will last? The Holding Surplus House (HSH) research project has created a Tiny House on Wheels as a mobile site for interventions that lets us explore alternative realities and environmental learning pedagogies with our physical bodies in a household. For the conference Learnings/Unlearnings we offer the HSH as an exhibit and a panel to reflect on the artistic interventions themed “Seasonal Clothing”. The series of interventions provoke householders, designers, and a more general public to unlearn control, predictability, and immediate availability when it comes to interior design, materiality and interactions in diverse households. The interventions help us generate a bodily connection to, experience of and engagement with alternative practices when it comes to householding with resources. We draw on an embodied approach to enable participants in our interventions to become able to un/learn and make sense of their bodies as a source to reimagine the space of home. For this conference we focus on the values of interdependence and dynamic relations in non-formal encounters through sharing situated learnings from the “Seasonal clothing” experiments in exhibition contexts and beyond, as well as inviting for new embodied learnings., HSH, Holding Surplus House

Design in general, including participatory design, has been and is still closely entangled with an idea of progress molded by modernism, technological development, rationality and economic growth. Today, when trying to shift towards other motivations and meanings in designing, we as designers find ourselves being haunted by this legacy. In this workshop we invite participants to make present and carefully untie designs’ entanglements with progress and to craft concrete imaginaries of a more socio-ecological just design after progress. Through this workshop we hope to start building a community around present-ing design histories and making a repertoire of narratives of how to be better haunted in participatory design. The workshop will take the form of a séance that is based on stories and images from the participants’ ongoing work that speaks to where they have sensed a haunting by the ghosts of progress embedded in design. This could for example be in a design method that you are using, a learning objective in your design curricula, an evaluation criterion, a design outcome that you have been involved with as a professional design practitioner, design educator or design researcher. It is imperative that the participants are in agreement with the workshop organisers that the séance is in itself an experimental attempt to explore a non-linear way of searching for the barely present or not easily discernible ideals or mechanisms of progress in participatory design. It is not to be confused with calling for supernatural spirits or deceased kins., Design after Progress: Reimagining Design Histories and Futures

How to imagine other kinds of world-making when there is a loss of species; livelihoods are threatened, and lives are on the line? Stoddard et al. (2021) note that there is a lack of social imaginaries. Critical, creative practices act in a tradition of responding to complex questions by turning them into embodied inquiries and opportunities to imagine how things could be otherwise (Mareis and Paim 2021; DiSalvo 2022). The project Un/ Making Pollination is a designerly response to the twofolded lack of pollinators and imagination. It is an exploration on how to approach more liveable feminist futures by relationship building across species, with a focus on plant-pollinator-human relationships. The authors give a critical account of choices in the creation of a series of posters and hand pollination tools as feminist methods of opening ecosocial imaginaries. These feminist ways of knowing and worlding are also methods of inquiring, making, giving form, using senses, connecting temporalities, spaces and bodies, getting attracted, lured in and touched by the making and unmaking of biodiversity. We articulate and perform references of feminist methods for combining knowledge production with everyday life that can contribute to imagining otherworlds., Un/Making Matters

Det här kapitlet börjar i att bända upp stenar med designstudenter på exkursion. Några stenar var små. En var stor. Det behövdes mycket kraft och samarbete för att bända upp den stora ur fältet. Vart åker internationella designutbildningsprogram i Småland, baserade i Växjö och Kalmar, på exkursion för att förstå design och sin egen designerroll bättre? Vi känner till exempel till stora möbeltillverkare och vi känner till den stolta glastraditionen. Men eftersom fokus var på resiliens i de här lärandemomenten blev svaret en kombination av platser där drömmar om alternativa samhällen har tagit sig uttryck i skrift, odling och i relationer som får livet att fortgå., I boken finns också en engelsk version av samma text., Hushålla med överskott

This chapter starts off in an excursion where design students were working on moving stones in a field. Some of the stones were small. One of them was big. It took a lot of effort and cooperation to shift the big one and move it off of the field. Where do international design programmes in Småland, based in Växjö and Kalmar, go on excursions to seek a better understanding of design and their own role as designers? We know about big furniture manufacturers, and we know about the proud traditions in glass. However, since the focal point for these classes was resilience1, the answer to the question became a combination of places in which dreams of alternative social orders have been expressed in writing, through agriculture, and in relationships that keep life going., This text is a translation from Swedish. Both texts appear in the same book next to each other., Holding Surplus House

Access to clean and healthy water in households is a global concern. Although the value of water is recognised, human actions demonstrate the opposite. Uncontrolled consumption, increasing drylands, deterioration, and pollution of water sources are some manifestations of the human water footprint. These actions evidence a paradox of value, a discrepancy between the intention and the action of water care. To this extent, and to decipher this paradox, this research project was conducted through design where the systemic value of water was studied in the context of Swedish households. The central question was to identify what are those values, mindsets, norms, behaviours, and lifestyles associated with the use of freshwater in households. In addressing this question, theories such as social norms, behaviour, and systems, as well as local, regional, and global projects, were reviewed, and the behaviour was mapped with the help of open surveys, as well as with stakeholders involving a technical expert from government, design teachers and industry-connected designers with the intention of revealing the systemic value of water. As a result, two areas of the system emerged that are useful for guiding design efforts to reduce the intention-action gap. The first area focuses on mapping norms and behaviours with respect to value preferences and expectations. These norms and behaviours were organised into levels of product and service design and systemic, organisational, and social design. The second area identified twenty behavioural components that were grouped into four factors related to the functioning of motivation, education, information, and social relations that increase the water value gap., Postdoctoral position - Valuing Water: Designing norms and behaviours for water positive lives at home

This article proposes un/making as a designerly response to urgent environmental issues. By focusing on the simultaneous constructive and destructive aspects of design, this effort attempts to challenge design's dominant focus on making new things. The implications and potentialities of un/making are explored through a designerly inquiry into ongoing and emerging attempts to ban the plastic straw. Based on this inquiry, the article proposes an approach to un/making that is driven by speculative, what if questions, informed by the history of the plastic straw: from coming into being to becoming preferable and now emerging as a matter of concern. Through a series of speculative design artifacts, the authors articulate matters at stake in the un/making of the plastic straw. They also show how these matters are a stake in the un/making of disposability as part of a preferable future. Rather than proposing one preferable future, the article highlights the frictions that emerge in un/making.

Design is conventionally considered to be about making and creating new things. But what about the converse of that process – unmaking that which already exists? Researchers and designers have recently started to explore the concept of “unmaking” to actively think about important design issues like reuse, repair, and unintended socio-ecological impacts. They have also observed the importance of unmaking as a ubiquitous process in the world, and its relation to making in an ongoing dialectic that continually recreates our material and technological realms. Despite the increasing attention to unmaking, it remains largely under-investigated and under-theorized in HCI. The objectives of this workshop are therefore to (a) bring together a community of researchers and practitioners who are interested in exploring or showcasing the affordances of unmaking, (b) articulate the material and epistemological scopes of unmaking within HCI, and (c) reflect on frameworks, research approaches, and technical infrastructure for unmaking in HCI that can support its wider application in the field., Selection process: juried. "Workshops will be selected through evaluation by a small jury and the Workshops chairs.", Un/Making Matters, Swedish Research Council 2017-02198

This paper discusses craft and design practices through their impact on the environment. We consider how to act concerning the consequences of the craft and design industry. Also, we reflect on the agency of our field of practice in changing how we perceive the environment. We present three case studies of the European glass industry sites in Sweden, Italy and Finland, where we study contamination of the soil with participatory, speculative and craft methods. Through these cases, we reflect on our role in soil communities and ask how we may act in them with responsibility, hope and care. We conclude by proposing to act locally, to share our practices and make them visible, expanding our situated, personal skills and knowledge towards the political., Un/Making Matters

Collaborative Future-Making is a research platform at the Faculty of Culture and Society at Malmö University that is concerned with how to envision, elaborate and prototype multiple, inclusive, and sustainable futures. The platform gathers around 20 researchers that share a methodological interest in how critical perspectives from the humanities and social sciences can be combined with the constructive and collaborative aspects of making and prototyping in design research. The research centers around two major themes: Critical imagination​, which focuses on how basic assumptions, norms and structures can be challenged to widen the perspectives on what can constitute socially, culturally, ecologically and economically sustainable and resilient futures. Collaborative engagements​, which focuses on how we can set up more inclusive collaborations to prototype and discuss alternative futures, engaging not only professionals and policy makers but also citizens and civil society. During 2019 the research group set out to make a shared glossary for collaborative future-making. The glossary is multiple in purpose and exists in several versions. Hopefully there will be more to come. At first, the making and articulation of the glossary was used within the research group as an exercise to share concepts that we found central to collaborative future-making, coming from different disciplines. This published version of the glossary was assembled to be used during a workshop called ​Imagining Collaborative Future-Making,​ which gathered a group of international researchers from different disciplines. The collection of concepts reflects the heterogeneous and diverse character of the research group and a strong belief in that plurality regarding ontologies and epistemologies will be crucial to be able to handle the multiple uncertainties and complex challenges we have to face in the future. Some of the concepts are already well established within different research communities, but

This paper takes as its starting point the fact that we live in the aftermath of previous making and design. For participatory design to adequately answer to this aftermath, we suggest building on a combination of participatory and speculative design approaches in everyday life settings and exploring the practice of un/making matters. The paper draws on two cases where participants have been invited to engage with recent scientific findings and practices - one where they explore the practice of un/making plastic waste through composting, and one on un/making polluted soil through plants that can accumulate metals. By not primarily aiming at feeding into new iterations of a design process, there is an openness for speculating beyond the given systems, and to bring into question imaginaries of constant progress, which have been part of generating these lingering matters., Un/Making Matters

This chapter focuses on a collaborative project involving a series of walks on remote Icelandic beaches, sending participants home with their own worms; beach bonfires; and dinner parties in Reykjavik and Westfjords in Iceland. Many of these events emerged in the process of doing speculative design research with and about humans and nonhuman participants. The authors critically reflect on how these events and practices gave shape to multiple un/expected happenings in public., Financed by Nordisk kulturfond., Hybrid Matters

Un/Making Matters

How can we, together, make our home on Earth in a time of mass extinction, climate change and social segregation? In this book two interplaying housing crises converge. The first concerns affordable and suitable housing for groups unprioritised by the housing market: older persons, students and migrants. The second concerns our home on Earth: science gives us but a decade to avert catastrophic climate change. This book aims at both reporting on research in the project BOOST metadesign and providing hands-on advice akin to that offered in home economics classes. The book starts performing Oikology – Home ecologics, a field of knowledge and practice in times of complexity, messiness and never finished labour of making homes together within Earth’s limits. The exploration of housing development for older persons, students and migrants in a context of sustainability has been carried out during 2016–19 through processes of co-creation in urban and rural parts of Småland, southern Sweden. Metadesign has opened up for a holistic and systemic take on home making that integrates different dimensions of sustainability and moves from the small and local to the all-encompassing. This book is for people who make homes in their personal or professional lives. It imagines an overarching paradigm of home making which starts from relationships. This is exemplified through speculative scenarios, a set of cruxes to be bounced into the planning process, methods for transdisciplinary co-creation and 29 recipes for home making., BOOST

Recipe for scenario salad - a method for transdisciplinary co-creation., BOOST metadesign

BOOST metadesign

This paper shares the process and insights from designing the dissemination of the development project BOOST metadesign. The three-year long project has developed housing proposals at the intersection of migrants, students and an ageing population, in a context of sustainability. We have been working through iterative processes of co-creation, with members from these three stakeholder groups, as well as representatives from the building sector and governance. The paper relates considerations in dissemination of the project to two principles of resilience: diversity and overlap in governance. It describes how we pursued resilience through a hybrid format of dissemination. The openness of this slideshow-performance-talkshowexhibition- film-book has made it workable across a range of contexts and audiences. It also manifests the challenging of dominant power structures and epistemological hierarchies in design’s meeting with other disciplines which the project has entailed. This has come to also include challenging the modernist legacy in design.

Discussion of the scenario of Trans-Port and how the project has led to trans-port of understandings and proposals., BOOST metadesign

This chapter discusses a historical context of housing., BOOST metadesign

Method for workshop to explore housing needs and dreams with transdisciplinary groups., BOOSR metadesign

Method for bringing out the secret, hidden, shameful aspects of co-creation and collaboration and of the topic of work., BOOST metadesign

Method for exploring how a community can generate social values beyond its needs., BOOST metadesign

As design research matures and interacts more extensively with other academic disciplines, design research communities are engaging more profoundly and reflexively with the nature of research itself and the particular “situated knowledges” (Haraway) of design and the design researcher. Criticality, in design research today, involves interrogation of the theories and methods through which we do research. While early varieties of ‘criticality’ in design research drew largely from Frankfurt School critical theories, feminist theories are increasingly prevalent as a critical modality in design research by attending to issues such as power, positionality, embodiment, relationality, materiality, territoriality and temporality.

Ej belagd 180724Artist book.