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Date and Time

Monday, Apr 25 - Friday, 29, 2022

10:00 — 7:00 pm

Location

Admission

FREE

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Design Research Week 2022

With the intersections between ‘Design’ and ‘Research’ still debated and open for interpretations, we set out to reaffirm the inextricable relationship between design as a discipline and design as a practice by hosting Northeastern University College of Arts, Media and Design’s inaugural “Design Research Week”, in partnership with the Design Museum Foundation and DESIS Network.

Each day hosted panels, workshops and other activities around a specific ‘bridge’ between design and other disciplines, from Design and Healthcare to Design and AI, with a focus on design methods and processes, and Meta-Design: how should we re-frame/re-think design as a driver for interdisciplinary research, to address the complexity of current societal challenges?

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Thank you to all those who helped to bring Design Research Week 2022 to life, especially Jocelyn Rice and the team at Design Museum Foundation; Ezio Manzini and Teresa Franqueria of DESIS Network; Beth Noveck and the Burnes Center for Social Change; Trish Leavitt, Ceci Menchetti, Anjelica Montemayor, Brittani LeBel, Lucy Purvis and others in CAMD‘s Dean’s office; Keith Motley at Cabral Center, Adam Polgreen of Pack Network; and all those who presented their research as part of Design Research Week 2022.

Date and Time

Monday, Apr 25 - Friday, 29, 2022

10:00 — 7:00 pm

Location

Admission

FREE

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The Impact of Climate Change in young Adults’ Mental Health

1:30 – 2:00 P.M.

Estefania CiliottaMiso KimMichael Arnold Mages , Susan Mello, (Sara Jensen Carr)

This research project is seeking to understand attitudes in young adults (18-24) regarding climate change and how it affects mental health and health behaviors. We hypothesize that the environmental risk wrought by climate change and the national conversation on sustainability likely leads to a spectrum of beliefs, behaviors, and values regarding personal agency and resilience, which we are loosely defining as climate nihilism, climate ambivalence, and climate hope. Design probes were developed to explore connections between university students’ climate change attitudes and their health during the first phase of this research. Thematic analysis of probes (replete with elicitive drawing, etched stone, mapping, and writing activities) revealed a rich spectrum of climate change perceptions, eco-emotions, and key areas of impact.

Design For Empowered Patientship: Mapping the Boston Healthcare Ecosystem

2:00 – 2:30 P.M. 

Estefania CiliottaPaolo Ciuccarelli,  Miso Kim, Stefano Maffei, Michael Arnold Mages

This research team is mapping the healthcare ecosystems of Boston and Milan, exploring the co-design and co-production processes that contain evidence of patient-driven innovation. The project observes and maps different scenarios in which design plays a role in the interdisciplinary innovation process, mapping experiences and practices of products-services, technologies, organizational processes, initiatives, public programs or actions, and policies—with the goal of pinpointing and connecting this emergent knowledge to the actors’ system that produced them. The mapping of the Boston healthcare ecosystem will be compared with Milano’s to clarify the nature of the empowered patientship and identify opportunities for strategic cross-connections and research initiatives through interdisciplinary collaborations and partnerships. The project aims to promote a cure to care cultural, pragmatic, and interdisciplinary transition in healthcare systems; nurturing a patient-centric development of new products-services to provide more agency and choices to patients and promote health equity and inclusion (meaning impact on individual satisfaction and community welfare).

 

Uncovering: MFA Students’ Thesis Exhibition

5:30 – 7:30 P.M. 

“Uncovering” is the act of removing a barrier and revealing what was previously unknown; exposing what was formerly hidden from view. It is an act driven by curiosity and can lead to an enhanced understanding of traditionally shrouded topics. In the 2022 MFA Thesis Exhibition, we use uncovering as a means to share our explorations into areas that we found meaningful, yet commonly overlooked. What happens when we seek to understand the elements of our lives that often remain covered, unnoticed, and unknown? Design is intelligence made visible. — Alina Wheeler, author

Liz Kantak, MFA Information Design and Visualization
An Exploration of Active Play: from infancy to adolescence and beyond

In the United States of America, active play is a fundamental aspect of many early childhood experiences. Beginning with the development of the most basic motor skills as infants, young children go on to utilize play as a mechanism for developing a wide array of skills that set them up for a lifetime of activity. The act of play provides a unique outlet for children to learn how to cultivate social skills, continue to advance their motor skills, and build an overall foundation for lifelong physical literacy. Despite being a pillar of early childhood development, playing is often brushed aside as children age into adolescence. This exhibition will showcase the various stages of human development, and frame the overall importance of playing in the lives of people.

“Play is the foundation of learning, creativity, self-expression, and constructive problem-solving.” Susan Linn

Qinzhe Chen, MFA Experience Design
City Impressions: belonging and living in Boston

Do you ever have a moment when you feel you really belong to the city? Do you get the feeling that you are part of the community, and have a strong connection with the neighborhood you live in at that moment? This exhibition will show how new residents learn of new places in Boston, how to build connections with the city, and where people feel a sense of belonging. By interacting with several artifacts, visitors will gain a better understanding of the city – it will be a memorable experience for everyone.

Date and Time

Monday, Apr 25 - Friday, 29, 2022

10:00 — 7:00 pm

Location

Admission

FREE

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Scout Labs & Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM): Facing Boston’s Civic Challenges through Human-centered Design

1:30 – 2:30 P.M.

Noah Berkowitz, Chloe Prock, Margarita Barrios Ponce, and Brandon Yap

Join three undergraduate design students from Northeastern University as they discuss Scout, Northeastern’s Student led design studio, its history, body of work, and their partnership with the Boston Mayor’s office to resolve civic issues through human-centered design.

Game Design Undergraduate Capstone Project Showcase

5:30 – 8:00 P.M. CURRY INDOOR QUAD

Ryan Malony, Northeastern alumnus and Associate Producer, Proletariat Games

Join the Northeastern Game Design program for games from across the degree programs as well as faculty work, with a talk from program alumnus Ryan Malony.

Date and Time

Monday, Apr 25 - Friday, 29, 2022

10:00 — 7:00 pm

Location

Admission

FREE

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Designer-AI Collaboration for User Need Finding and Generative Design 

2:00 – 3:00 P.M.

Estefania Ciliotta, Paolo CiuccarelliTucker MarionMohsen Moghaddam,  Lu Wang

This project imagines user-centered design processes where the latent needs of users are automatically elicited from social media, forums, and online reviews, and translated into new concept recommendations for designers. This project will advance the fundamental understanding of if and how AI can augment the performance of designers in early-stage product development by investigating two fundamental questions: (1) Can we build and validate novel natural language processing (NLP) algorithms for large-scale elicitation of latent user needs with cross-domain transferability and minimal need for manually labeled data? (2) Can we build and validate novel deep generative design algorithms that capture the visual and functional aspects of past successful designs and automatically translate them into new design concepts?

BFA Interaction Design Capstone Fair

3:00 – 5:00 P.M.

Michael Arnold Mages, Mark Sivak, and their BFA students

7 student teams will be presenting work from the Interaction Design Capstone Sequence. These are student-authored, student-led projects that were developed over the past academic year.

Date and Time

Monday, Apr 25 - Friday, 29, 2022

10:00 — 7:00 pm

Location

Admission

FREE

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Embodying Information: creating somatic experiences of data through dance

1:30 – 3:30 P.M.

Facilitators: Laura Perovich, Ilya Vidrin, Nicole Zizzi

The Embodying Information workshop will offer participants (1) an overview of the possibilities for engagement between dance and design, (2) practice-based experience with embodied modes of representing data, (3) an introduction to concepts and structures in dance that provide new opportunities in data physicalization.

The workshop will include a warm up followed by a series of data movement activities and opportunities for reflection and collective meaning making. Warm up activities will serve to activate bodies and may include body scans and guided imagery techniques. During data movement activities, participants will experiment with elements of movement and the ways in which they can be mapped to traditional data representations. The workshop will include individual and group reflections with prompts aimed at probing connections with participants’ disciplines as well as a critical engagement with both the movement and data.

For this virtual workshop, we ask that participants bring basic design supplies (e.g. a notebook, pen/pencil, camera/phone, post-it notes) and find a space they can comfortably move in within their camera view. We also encourage participants to leave cameras on for active engagement with the group. No past dance or data experience is required.

Design Research Tools and Methods: Categorization as  Meaning-making

3:30 – 5:30 PM

Facilitators:  Estefania CiliottaPaolo CiuccarelliNathan Felde, Ezio Manzini, Nicole Zizzi
Including Interdisciplinary Design and Media PhD students: Uttkarsh Narayan, Skye Moret, and Mahsa Nasri

In recent years, there has been an explosion of publicly available design tools that are becoming more popular among both designers and non-designers. This has enhanced other practices and disciplines by making conceptual design thinking– a designerly way of knowing– more accessible to all. Without a common or widely accepted categorization of what constitutes a design method, as opposed to a design tool, though, the discourse lacks a systematic approach for organizing and differentiating these resources. Is the lack of a categorization methodology hindering our ability to effectively use and perform more rigorous and reflective design research?

In the context of the Research Methods course within the NEW Interdisciplinary Design and Media PhD program, this workshop will welcome participants to interact with a repository of design tools and methods. The activity will consist of asking participants to find the best way to structure/organize the available resources in a canvas or Miroboard, coming up with categories, filters and navigation agreed upon by the whole team/group.

 

Hearing sounds, collecting data: how to map the world through the act of listening

5:30 – 7:00 P.M.

Facilitator: Sara Lenzi

The workshop will blend hands-on activities with a reflection on the insights we can gather from acoustic data as autographs of complex phenomena. The workshop is divided into two parts. The first part (approx. 40’) is dedicated to an outdoor soundwalk activity with the goal of increasing our awareness of the sonic environment and the information that we receive through listening. Listening methods and tips to decode this information will be shared with the participants as we walk around the NU campus. During the second part (approx. 30’), we will use sonic data to create visual soundmaps of the spaces we visited using different visualization techniques. We will leave enough space for discussion and feedback on the experience.

Date and Time

Monday, Apr 25 - Friday, 29, 2022

10:00 — 7:00 pm

Location

Admission

FREE

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Gameful Design with StudyCrafter

1:30 – 2:30 PM

Casper Harteveld, Nithesh Javvaji, Mehmet Kosa, Omid Mohaddesi, Uttkarsh Narayan,  Mahsa Nasri, and Giovanni Troiano

In this panel talk, we present StudyCrafter, a free engine to empower users to create, play, share, and analyze gamified projects. We showcase how this platform has been used to speculate about post-covid world impressions, study supply chain decisions, develop innovative therapeutic solutions, make engaging surveys and experiments, and create impactful games. We also demonstrate how this platform empowers others to design, in particular users who may not know how to program or make games. We discuss the opportunities and limitations of StudyCrafter and how it and related authoring tools can help us achieve a more gameful world.

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