Det var redan i början av augusti förra året den inleddes, den senaste offensiven mot kunskapsområdet konstnärlig forskning, och det under en festival tillägnad sakprosan. En författare avvek i ett panelsamtal från huvudämnet för ett avslöjande. ”Ni kanske inte är medvetna om det, men det finns en akademisk företeelse som går under namnet konstnärlig forskning – och den växer med oroande hastighet.” Syftet var uppenbart. Konstnärlig forskning är en elakartad utväxt i vad som annars är en naturlig dynamik mellan vetenskap och konst; ett oerhört kostbart akademiskt missfoster, som kväver den fria konsten. Demoniseringen sattes sedan på pränt i ett par artiklar av författaren under hösten, inlägg som gett upphov till både skadeglada tillrop och skarpa motreaktioner.1 Dokumentären Fallet Bogdan, som sändes i december på SVT, förstärkte utifrån ett lika kraftigt vinklat perspektiv ytterligare en direkt felaktig bild av vad som är ett mångfacetterat, praktikbaserat kunskapsområde. 

Mot bakgrund av det här vill jag inledningsvis slå fast två saker. För det första att någon konstnärlig forskning i bestämd form singular självklart inte existerar. Inte heller sociologisk, teknikvetenskaplig eller medicinsk forskning låter sig entydigt definieras, än mindre med hänvisning till en enda underkänd avhandling, ett fåtal exempel berövade sin kontext, rapsodiska titlar på forskningsprojekt eller felaktiga och missuppfattade budgetposter.  För det andra förhåller sig konstnärlig forskning – för det är just forskning det handlar om – till långt mer än de uttrycksformer, historiska ”genrer” och kontexter, som konventionellt uppfattas som Konstens.

With the point of departure in the arts-oriented critical design research project DNA at Play, this paper intends to draw attention to the emergent field of ‘recreational genetics,’ that is direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing for genealogical purposes and the adjacent digital platforms that have emerged, promoting genealogy as a new form of family game. Developed as a series of inter into the market logics and strategies of these biotechnological services, the project primarily raises the methodological question of how to critically investigate an increasingly layered, biometrically conditioned everyday life. While set up as social media platforms connecting people and making it possible for them to bring to life their family histories, discuss their origins, and share ancestry narratives, the business idea driving the genetic testing companies is the accumulation of genetic data as an asset for future uses. Providing a wide array of genealogy related tools and data visualization software, the platforms engage and expand their user base, hence competing for shares on what is a rapidly expanding and increasingly lucrative biotechnological market. Through the development of a series of artifacts here called ‘metalogical objects,’ DNA at Play draws attention to the different ways in which genealogy platforms operate, the knowledge claims they present, the promises they make and the narratives and tropes that they produce and reproduce. In this way, the research project activates the specific rhetorical, aesthetic and technological mechanisms that are put into play on the recreational genetics market, while at the same time opening up for a media sensitive, bioethical and ethnopolitical critique, raising questions about the cognitive and sociopolitical consequences that the ‘entertaining’ yet profit-driven datafication of ancestry brings. The concluding argument is that, while building on ‘scientificity,’ what is on offer through the genealogical platforms is a highly speculative, entertaining mix of stereotypical genealogical imaginaries, always possible to further ‘upgrade’. 

Debates continue about the positioning of design within research-driven universities. While the idea of autonomy has had a strong appeal, it is the bridging across established academic cultures that has proved especially effective for legitimizing design research and research education. Revisiting a conception of design as a ‘Third Space’ and drawing on a case – the Swedish Faculty for Design Research and Research Education (2008–2015) – we discuss what ‘thirdness’ can entail in context. Our account of this case reveals the unsettled dynamics of navigating in, between and across academic cultures. Design research education, we argue, has prospects to cultivate a critical space within academia, in which its ‘thirdness’ entails sensitization and agitation of the territorial conditions of knowledge. There is a need for a reconsideration of design – and academia more generally – not as a static disciplinary order but as a contested archipelago that opens for alternative orientations.

What are the spatial ontologies that insidiously shape the landscape narratives we tell? And if narratives are contingent on future worlds, what biopolitics do they carry in order to emerge and unfold into conditioning landscapes?

There is a deep-rooted tendency to think of landscapes as discrete, self-emerging entities bound by a taken-for-granted Cartesian space. But what has emerged from these landscapes are colonial and capitalist narratives that have naturalized and morally justified the ‘scaping’ of land through demarcation and enclosure; narratives imposing on people future dreams set by dominant forces based on the fantasy that greening is universally ‘good’ and that development and modernity locating at certain areas are processes ‘without an outside’.

Rock-Paper-Scissors is a game usually played by two people, in which each player simultaneously forms one of three shapes with an outstretched hand. These shapes are ‘rock’ (a closed fist), ‘paper’ (a flat hand) and ‘scissors’ (a fist with the index finger and middle finger extended, forming a V). It is a zero-sum game with three possible outcomes: a win, a loss or a draw. As you probably know, the rules are inexorably simple: ‘rock blunts scissors’, ‘paper covers rock’ and ‘scissors cuts paper’, complemented by a fourth kind of situation, where gestures cancel each other out or meet on equal terms.

Is landscape architecture becoming a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors? A game where the very basic elements are being played out against each other in an off-the-drawing-board game, in turn cut to pieces by commercial interests? A game where gains never exceed losses and the best outcome to hope for is a tie?

In the ever-present context of global warming and the acute loss of biodiversity, forests are at the centre of the reflections of theoreticians and practitioners around the globe. The contributions in this issue of JoLA take the stance that forests should also be at the centre of cities, the very places that, throughout the history of humankind, have fundamentally developed against forests, as Robert Harrison has masterfully shown in his epochal Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. As a primeval matrix that preceded humankind on earth, it is only the evolutional stadium of sedentarization that led to the progressive and often massive clearing of forests, with their edge gradually becoming ‘the edge of civilization’.

Forests—at least in the Western world—have long served as antinomic poles to the city, where the wild, the magic, the forbidden . . . unfolded in mysterious ways. This bipolarity became increasingly blurred with industrialization and the sprawling cities it produced, and then later suburbanization, and now the pressing climate crisis we are experiencing and the ever-faster growing deforestation rates that are redefining boundaries and, needless to say, are beyond alarming. Even if some parts of human societies still inhabit forested environments, today forests exist more as protected, endangered relics or as small remaining patches in overexploited urbanizing landscapes.

The Future of Design Education working group on doctoral education included doctoral supervisors from nine programs around the world and addressed the indeterminacy of standards for the PhD in Design. Internationally, “contributions to knowledge” under the PhD degree title range from evidence-based investigations documented in a dissertation to personal reflections on making artifacts. In some programs, quantitative and qualitative research methods are taught; in others, there is no instruction in methods. The working group suggested that reflection on one’s own creative production is the role of the professional master’s degree and recommended standards for two doctoral programs—the PhD and the Doctor of Design (DDes). The group defined the PhD as addressing unresolved problems with the goal of generalizable knowledge or theory for the field. It described the DDes as a professional practice degree in which research is done in a practice setting to frame a specific opportunity space, guide in-process design decisions, or evaluate outcomes. DDes findings do not claim generalizability and result in “cases.” The working group discussed methods, sampling, standards of evidence and claims, ethics, research writing, and program management.

What does it mean to act – and to design – in times as dark and obscure as the current? This is the troubling question raised in the Bloomsbury Visual Arts book series Designing in Dark Times. In their contribution to the series, Eduardo Staszowski, associate professor of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School of Design, and Virginia Tassinari, post-doctoral fellow at Politecnico di Milano, turn to the political philosophy of German-American philosopher Hanna Arendt (1906-1975). Taking an increasingly self-destructive and distressed humanity as their point of departure, the two design researchers have invited a wide range of design scholars and practitioners to “adopt” one of Arendt’s concepts to reconsider the status and role of design today. The result is An Arendtian Lexicon, an edited volume featuring fifty-five short essays that in different ways engage terms from Arendt’s oeuvre. While alphabetically structured, the line-up of entries is not exhaustive, nor is it to be understood as a set of dictionary definitions. Instead, it constructs a clustering of Arendtian terms, central also to the contemporary design debate. Yet apart from being introduced in the editors’ introductory essay, the clusters remain opaque until the end of each entry, where they present as suggestions for cross-reading.