Call for participation: Making Design Matter!   

The challenges affecting society today require fresh approaches — how can we continue to make design matter? Nordes 2011 invites designers and design researchers to explore the possibilities.

Design touches human lives in a myriad of ways. Designers create products, systems and services that have become indispensible to the ways in which people work, live and communicate. Many designs merely feed consumerism, while others never impact the market. Whereas some design introduces formative changes within society, the majority falls into disuse or is simply forgotten. Designers create things that shape human life, but the value created and common good of design cannot be taken for granted.

Designers currently work to make design matter in many ways, such as:
• Impacting the public sector, as in urban and service design
• Revisiting craft approaches to skill, aesthetics and production
• Studying the historical and social shaping of material culture
• Staging meaningful participatory and human-centered design processes
• Involving design management to influence organizations and stakeholders
• Stimulating changes in values through critical and artistic tactics

Nordes 2011 invites participants to explore and discuss: What matters are at stake for designers today? What kinds of perspectives and alternatives are needed? In which ways can we develop the discipline and practice? How does design research matter?

Nordes 2011 invites contributions that share:
• Examples exploring the meaning and consequences of design
• Explorations of the changing im/material objects of design
• Experiments in design teaching, research and management
• Analyses of design culture, methods and theories
• Reflections on the limits of design, including ethics and politics