Umeå University's logo

The attention to methods is central in design practice. In the context of IASDR 2023 this panel could thus have been suggested within any of the conference tracks. However, we are more specifically addressing the query highlighted in the Changing Communities track: “How can we innovate collaborative processes and codesign knowledge, methods, and tools while considering current socio-technological transformations?”

The panel focuses on the evolution and making of new methods, investigating the relationships between theory and practice through the entry point of methods. We see the need for building an agenda for researching how designing not only makes methods, but is itself shaped by its methods, and how methods carry ideas about what designing could be. In emerging participatory and collaborative design practices, developing methods for community engagement (Wahlin & Blomkamp, 2022), for making publics (Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013; Lindström & Ståhl, 2014) and creating commons (Bruyns & Kousoulas, 2022) aims to address issues of the roles and agencies of design in reimagining and reformulating world views, norms, and behaviours. Developing design methods through experimentation and critical reflection seems essential to design, whether in commercial, public, pedagogical, or research contexts. Despite this, research conversations that explicitly take a starting point from design methods are fairly infrequent nowadays. With this panel, we wish to revisit and reopen conversations on design methods in discussing emerging design practices from points of view that highlight how designing is shaped by methods, and how methods carry ideas about what design and designing could be.