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.

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 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.  

When the edited volume Site Matters was first published in 2005, it was at a time when the meaning of the word site had just passed what we in hindsight may describe as the real/virtual tipping point. Having fulfilled its duty as a progressivist signpost in the zoning of the modern cityscape, the word was already back then fully registered as a basic staple of the network technology and the World Wide Web. If the word used to have certain concrete environmental referentials, according to the editors it had become increasingly ‘disassociated from the considerations of physical conditions’ (Burns &amp, Kahn 2005: ix) reflected in increasingly lofty and speculative, computer-aided urban design proposals, furthermore often projecting settings meant to be mediated rather than experienced ‘live’. Over less than a decade, the morphological and experiential variety previously implied in the word site—building sites, campsites, landfill sites, landing sites, nesting sites, picnic sites, or archeological sites, just to mention a few—had merged to form a generic, informational and communicative web-site, a mere placeholder for a mesh of interlinked, stacked and exchangeable content. When the editors of Site Matters, Andrea Kahn and Carol J. Burns, now return to the topic in a significantly revised second edition, the ‘mattering’ of site is of a totally different magnitude. While their initial holding on to site might have been motivated by its material and analog qualities, the rationale behind their updated attempt to gather site insights and know-how is much more existential in kind.

Om det under vintern uppstått turbulens på den svenska konstens innanhav, med Konstfackskolan som epicentrum, så har det i de danska konstkanalerna rörts upp häftiga svallvågor. Upprinnelsen är en aktion som genomfördes i det fördolda i höstas av Anonyme Billedkunstnerer, en grupp kopplade till Kunstakademiet i Köpenham. En vit gipsbyst föreställande 1700-talskungen och akademins grundare Fredrik V, för övrigt Gustav III:s svärfar, skruvades loss och enleverades från sin nisch i skolans festsal, för att sedan rituellt dumpas i hamninloppet utanför. I början av november offentliggjordes aktionen, genom en video publicerad på sajten idoart.dk, vilket väckte omedelbar indignation.

This chapter draws on experiences and lessons learned from a process of hands-on, reflective game co-designing. The case is from the Urban Transition Öresund project (2013-14) which involved co-design and urban researchers, professional game designers, and civil servants working with complex, cross-sector sustainable urban planning in threemunicipalities in Scandinavia. The process included framing, co-designing, testing and playing what came to be called the “Urban Transition” game – explored in various real-world urban planning processes. By dissecting four co-design and play testing situations of this serious, dialogue game, the chapter aims to elucidate the inherent abilities of games as formats for collaboration, negotiation and mutual learning. The main claim is that games are practically “political” – in the sense that they can re-open taken-for-granted urban planning themes by emphasizing details and holistic views; can reveal assumptions about others by actualizing conflicts and can challenge current and possible future municipal, situated socio-material collaborative practices. Therefore, in urban planning processes[F1]  aimed at sustainable development, games and game co-designing should not be seen as de-politicized quick fixes but rather as highly “political” platforms for negotiation.

The present report is an attempt to provide an overview over intersecting beginnings,

emergencies, and prolongations that reinforces a theoretical reflection on contemporary

cultural debate and its repercussions on societal development. With the current research

overview, we want to draw attention to assumptions about culture(s), as they are played out in

the intersection of migration and sustainable urban development. Multi-layered and doubleedged,

‘culture’ often comes with territorial postulates and implicit ideas about belongings and

borders, movements and rights of priority. The report approaches these entangled issues from

several angles. With the point of departure in current environmental policy, the first section of

the report, therefore, approaches ideas of “sustainability” via the notions of “culture” and

“locality”. A second section briefly discusses the methodological challenges of researching

emergent cultural phenomena across both geographical and disciplinary borders. In a third

section, we turn to three research reports, a sampling of the report literature, but representative

of how global, regional and local perspectives on culture today are ‘scaffolded’ in relation to

mobility and migration. A fourth section introduces emergent transversal, i.e. non-categorical,

approaches to cultural research, primarily focusing on how notions such as transnationalism

and translocality may inform new modes of research and urban development. A fifth section

finally, articulates some recommendations about how to relate to translocal space and

translocal subjectivities in practice and how to craft research approaches that not only involve

interlocutors but also answers to and actively engage in current spatial and cultural changes.

Thoroughly shaped by an industrial past, Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, has always prided itself on its many lush and accessible public green spaces. Historically significant, centrally located, and generous in size, the numerous green areas still lead some to characterize Malmö as “the city of parks” (Pehrsson 1986, Malmö Stad 1994). However, although parks have played an important sociopolitical role in the city, their current function, especially given an increasingly important climate-conscious urban agenda, is less clear. As an example, a recent survey by Statistics Sweden of green areas in Swedish municipalities with more than 30,000 inhabitants showed the labeling of Malmö as a park city to be much exaggerated, if not downright misleading. Of the thirty-seven municipalities analyzed in 2010, Malmö was the city with the lowest ratio of publically accessible green area per capita, less than 100 square meters, as compared to the 350 square meters per capita in the city with the highest proportion (Statistiska Centralbyrån 2015). The study also showed Malmö to be a city still influenced by heavy industry and infrastructure, with a very high ratio of paved areas and with the second-highest percentage of inhabitants completely lacking accessible greens within reasonable distance. While the 2015 survey gives valuable indications about differences in land-use patterns, it focuses primarily on urban green spaces from a structural and quantitative point of view. In the survey, the functional value of urban green spaces and their importance as interwoven, balancing, and restorative elements are implicit. The idea of green structure thus also reflects an ongoing reconceptualization of a former nature-culture divide, now in terms of connectivity (Hellmund and Smith 2006; La Point et al. 2015). No longer seen as an enclosed park—and thus as a sociopolitically motivated discontinuity, correcting and reoxygenating the urban corpus—urban greenery is now seen as one of several support systems, not least from an urban ecological point of view. Yet, despite emergent green structuring, the public urban park lingers, presenting an intricate and unsettling otherness reflective of ideological currents, fluctuating common resources, and social mobilization. As a manifestation of a distinct and complex spatiotemporality, the urban public park might—more or less accidentally—constitute a sustained critique of an increasingly structured urbanity. Using as a point of departure the planning and execution of a park in “the city of parks”—the Emporia Rooftop Park in the smart city district of Hyllie in Malmö—this article discusses the park as a networked yet unsettling materialization in an increasingly “connected” process of urbanization. Suspended between different interests and conceptions of urban growth, this process could potentially provide room for a radicalizing of urban imaginaries. However, it also lends itself to compensational, aestheticizing, and increasingly instrumentalized justifications, thus emptying the park of its divergent, and therefore political potentials. As a new and highly visible eco-engineering arena, the urban park is instead rapidly converted into a privileged minion in a new, green, design-driven, and future-oriented environmental joint venture, the political positions of which are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish.