Review: IASDR Conference 2009 (October 18th – 22nd), Seoul, Korea Syndicate content

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The IASDR 2009 was a great pleasure and success. Comparing this conference with the one before in Hong Kong 2007, the scientific quality of design research has very much improved. The sessions were dominated by research issues like ‘Behaviour and Interaction’, followed by sessions about ‘Design Methods and Tools’, ‘Design Education’, Sustainability/ Social Sustainability’, ‚Universal Design’ and ‚Design Management’.

However, Donald Norman - one of the famous keynotes of the conference next to Elizabeth Sanders, Kees Overbeeke et. al. - still regards design as a profession and not as a academic discipline taking natural sciences as scholarly benchmark. Moreover, he describes research as a self-referential process ‘just leading to further research, not to changes in the world”. And indeed: The conference also faced this risk. The network of design researchers does not only grow it also becomes more dense that means, it seems to me that the internal links between the conference contributions and contributors increase. This development indeed runs the risk of getting into a distance to practice which would become a disaster for a discipline like design because the power of design results from its application and impact on daily life. Consequently, we should not give away the chance to define our own ways of doing science, research and design.

http://www.iasdr2009.com/main.asp