Fig. Left: Elvia Vasconcelos. 2022. My research methods form a politics from what they question. What about yours? Right: Mafalda Gamboa. 2024. Stay with the trouble + be the trouble.
Fig. Left: Elvia Vasconcelos. 2022. My research methods form a politics from what they question. What about yours? Right: Mafalda Gamboa. 2024. Stay with the trouble + be the trouble.
Please join us for a one-day workshop on August 18 as part of the
Aarhus decennial conference 2025.
We’ll be working together under the ‘Design Researchers Trade Union’, a
speculative unifying structure, on a day of making on the theme of
protest. We will explore the materiality of the protest banner as a
political and performative device to gather around the notions of care,
repair, and justice in design research. Practically, we will be making
banners, stickers, and temporary tattoos, building shared ground through
making and storytelling. A detailed description of this proposal is
available
here.
We welcome participants from our interdisciplinary design community with
an interest in making and protest. No prior making experience is
necessary.
Join us
Please submit an image and a description of a protest object, in the
form of a 1–4 page PDF. Tell us what you would like to protest and what
role you would like to have in the trade union. For the protest object,
we encourage rough mockups such as sketches of protest banners, songs,
stickers, buttons, etc alongside a reflection on how this object
represents your values and commitments, brings you hope, and/or
integrates into a story you'd like to share. Submissions should be sent
to e.m.vasconcelos.de.gouveia@tue.nl by July 1st AoE the latest.
Fig. Helen Milne. 2017. Protest Flags.
This one-day workshop will be taking place from morning to late afternoon. The making activities of the day will be inspired by the work and practices of both participants and workshop organizers. Participants will be encouraged to express personal perspectives through stickers or tattoos, whilst contributing to larger collective gestures through shared banner-making. This could also involve performative elements, where participants collectively discuss or enact certain aspects of protest.
| Time | Activity |
|---|---|
| 09:00 - 10:00 | Introductions, materials and techniques |
| 10:00 - 12:00 | Making |
| 12:00 - 13:00 | Lunch |
| 13:00 - 16:00 | Making |
| 16:00 - 18:00 | Enactments and documentation. |
Design research is inherently both social and political. We are living and working in times of great unrest and upheaval, and we feel that our work must increasingly reflect this. We propose this workshop to engage with the material practices of protest. These range from long-held traditions of banners and badges to more emergent forms of zines, stickers, tattoos, and visible repairs. We propose a day of making and exchange to engage these practices. We will explore the materiality of the protest banner as a surface of collective expression, while also emphasizing care, repair, and feminist practices of collective knowledge-making in design research. Practically, we will be making banners, stickers, and temporary tattoos, using a speculative trade union as a unifying structure for discussions around care and justice in design.
Full paper: The possibility of protestElvia Vasconcelos is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Industrial Design of the Eindhoven University of Technology. Their work is grounded in the practice of sketchnoting, a live visual note-taking technique that they use to orchestrate collaborative processes. Elvia’s experience with organising and running workshops employs a combination of techniques such as collage, embroidery and zine making in order to make collective making processes visible.
Mafalda Gamboa is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg. She is an avid advocate of first-person perspectives as an essential component of design research and has written a number of autoethnographies including on her experience of pregnancy. With a background in architecture, she has a strong interest in making-oriented methods such as photography, sketching, stickers, embroidery, and collages. She has organised and run workshops at CHI and DIS.
Kristina Andersen is associate professor at the Department of Industrial Design of the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her work is concerned with how we can allow each other to imagine our possible futures through digital craftsmanship in the context of material practices of fiber-based things. She is especially interested in ephemeral archives and how they might point towards physical manifestations of different outcomes. She has previously organized and led a number of workshops at CHI and DIS.
Bruna Goveia da Rocha is assistant professor at the Department of Industrial Design of the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her work aims to advance research-through-making by exploring samples and sample making in the context of digital craftsmanship. Her practice focuses on explorative making, emerging technologies and cross pollination between techniques for textile innovation through a more-than-human perspective.
Seda Özçetin is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD candidate at Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University (SE) as part of DCODE Network and co-founder and lead designer of Hamide Design Studio (DK). Her work is informed by an attitude of in-betweenness that designerly reflects on the often hidden entanglements of everyday life. In her research, she explores care-centric approaches to forming sustainable relations with contemporary connected things as an alternative to Terms of Service. She holds a MSc in entrepreneurship from Lund University (SE), MSc. and bachelor’s degrees in industrial design from Middle East Technical University (TR).
Yuxi Liu is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of Delft University of Technology. Her practice is motivated by ongoing ecological urgencies and new potentialities of the artificial. She is especially interested in the entanglement of humans and nonhumans, more-than-human design perspectives, and pluralist approaches to knowing and doing. Her current research project focuses on posthuman negotiation of multi-intentional relations within and across AI systems.
Lone Koefoed Hansen is an associate professor of Digital Design at Aarhus University. Her research lies within digital technology studies, biased by aesthetics and the arts; it is interdisciplinary combining design, cultural studies, arts, and technology with theory and methods found in critical computing, co-design, STS, and feminist theory. A key point of her work is to use design and designing as something through which we might think of critical alternatives to the way we live, love, think, and organize.
Helen Milne is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Industrial Design of the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her work explores how the systems, processes and tools of textiles and their production can be expanded to include wider audiences as a way to navigate the complexities of our socio-ecological crisis. Her work traverses weaving, performance and storytelling as a situated practice where a multiplicity of experiences can co-exist. Her recent work at New Order of Fashion has focused on delivering workshops exploring holistic sustainable and circular approaches in fashion and textile making.
Léa Paymal is a doctoral student in the Design department of the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay and in the Computer Science department of the Université Paris-Saclay. Grounded on critical design and ethnographic design methods, her practice-based research interrogates the forms of engagement with domestic products and challenge the dominant design norms. Léa holds a BA in industrial fashion design from the Geneva University of Arts and Design and a Master’s degree in design research from the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay.