1. Please introduce yourself, your role in the DRS and your research.
Li Jönsson: I am a senior lecture at Malmö University, School of Arts and Communication (K3). I am currently working in the research projects Design after Progress, Reimagining Design Futures and Histories and Grief and Hope in Transition.
In uncertain times, with anthropogenic climate change, geopolitical instability and biodiversity crises it seems ever so important to expand and renew how such challenges can be responded to through design. As a constructive design researcher, I aim to accommodate a designerly engagement that does not contribute to quick solutions to a problem but a practice that opens alternative ways of understanding, intervening, and expanding issues by making proposals into the world. These are manifested through objects and materials as tangible and performative design experiments that explore new expressions to serve as entry points for developing other imaginaries and sensibilities in current times with a focus to contribute to publics experience and engagement to the natural world. That, among other things, relates to how democracy and sustainability can be better configured.
Through my research I address questions concerning the more-than-human futures, feminisms, public participation and engagement, and situated aesthetic experiences.
2. Could you talk about the initiatives you’re involved with in the DRS and any upcoming events you’d like to share?
Having recently been elected to be a member of the International Advisory Council I am mostly trying to understand DRS better, and how it at a community level can hold different, multidiciplinary, non-uniform ways of doing design research well. I will be more specific soon I hope.
Upcoming and happening events? Well, I would definitely like to share the Nordes PhD Summer School with the title “Socio-ecologically Just Design after Progress”. To get updates from the PhD course, follow the instagram (designafterprogress). However, I am pretty sure some of the work done here will also be featured at the upcoming Nordes conference.
3. What do you see as the benefits of being involved with the DRS and how can those interested become more involved in the Society?
The benefits of being involved in DRS is because one contributes to a structure and support for the messy grounds of making knowledge in multidiciplinary fields such as design research. By that, I mean that it is imortant that the Society can host many forms of different design research – which of course – relies on the participation of its members to make it interesting. Get involved!
I would like to recommend:
- “Letters South of (Nordic) Design” (Nordes 2017), a very important paper in terms of topic as we follow an e-mail exchange between colleagues, countrymen and friends – one located in Brussels (Belgium) and the other in Bogotá (Colombia). Different to traditional academic articles, there is no initial hypothesis proven throughout the text, but a narrative emerging from the conversation among peers.
Salazar, P.C.,and Borrero, A.G.(2017) Letters South of (Nordic) Design, in Stuedahl, D., Morrison, A. (eds.), Nordes 2017: Design + Power, 15 - 17 June, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway. https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2017.040
- Sarah Penningtons paper “Taking Care of Issues of Concern: feminist possibilities and the curation of Speculative and Critical Design” where she explore the intersection between the curation of Speculative and Critical Design (SCD) and the notion of ‘care’ as a question that has arisen in the work of feminist scholarship in technoscience. This is a well-written paper that brings together theory and practice in a interesting way.
Pennington, S. (2018) Taking Care of Issues of Concern: feminist possibilities and the curation of Speculative and Critical Design, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.632
- A bit of a classic paper “Design, Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism” by Carl DiSalvo that has been very important for expanding and making alternative approach to ‘design for democracy,’ drawing on the notion of agonistic pluralism.
DiSalvo, C. (2010) Design, Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism, in Durling, D., Bousbaci, R., Chen, L, Gauthier, P., Poldma, T., Roworth-Stokes, S. and Stolterman, E (eds.), Design and Complexity - DRS International Conference 2010, 7-9 July, Montreal, Canada.https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2010/researchpapers/31
- As I keep being curious on the notion of prefiguration in design I want to recommend Alix Gerbers paper “Prefigurative Politics and Design”.
Gerber, A.(2021) Prefigurative Politics and Design, in Leitão, R.M., Men, I., Noel, L-A., Lima, J., Meninato, T. (eds.), Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling, 22-23 July, Toronto, Canada.https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2021.0005
- And finally Pablo Hermansen and Martín Tironi “Designing and worlding: Prototyping equivocal encounters” that attentively follows the destruction of prototypes by the two chimpanzees Judy and Gombe. As argued by the authors, the “value of prototyping does not lay in the agreements reached or in the technical qualities of the artifact, but in the mistakes, problems, and destabilizing aspects that the prototyping process generated".
Hermansen, P., and Tironi, M. (2022) Designing and worlding: Prototyping equivocal encounters, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.330