Spring, Scotch & Small Talks: Our observations at the EAD 08 Conference ‚Connexity’, Aberdeen, April 2009

EAD 08 http://www.designconnexity.org/ was blessed with beautiful weather, well organized and socially very enjoyable. The quality of presentations, like most design conferences, varied.

The modern and well-lit RGU building was well chosen as a conference venue which hosted over 140 delegates. The conference organization was very smooth, e.g. registration went without problems. Only time keeping tended to be messy at the end of the day. And some more conference “decoration” would have made orientation easier and added more event atmosphere.

On site, we met old acquaintances and friends, and thanks to the friendly and open-minded participants we could also make some new ones. This was especially easy during lunch, when we searched through the 140 brown paper bags filled with sandwich, fruit and yoghurt arranged in rows on the cafeteria tables. The lunch bags were highly efficient and practical – no dreadful line up - and they reminded us of mom’s carefully prepared lunch bags for school.

All the social events were great fun: well organized and at beautiful venues. At the civic reception, the hospitable Aberdeen Mayor guided his guests around the town hall. He told stories of the legendary King Robert the Bruce (http://www.clanmcalister.org/robbruce.html) thanks to whom we got fed and drunk … famous Scotch whiskey! The conference dinner was made memorable by many, senior or young, capable or not, dancing together the Scottish way guided by the uplifting live music.

We attended four out of the five well presented keynotes. Josephine Green reported the promotion and implementation of the ‘network’ perspective on design at Philips. Some projects were briefly showed against a rather lengthy and perhaps dated discussion on the effects of the ‘network’ society. We missed the more critical reflection on the perspective and its more radical implementation. Toby Scott showed practical but not all too exciting projects on design as innovation. Klaus Krippendorf lively presented the main theses of ‘The Semantic Turn’ which were useful and which awaited practical examples. Fiona Raby talked about original proposals and projects from students at the RCA. Some of these went beyond the narrative fictional mode and were actually implemented. We would like to hear more about the theoretical development on which their projects were based.

There were five sessions with four parallel tracks each. We attended over 15 presentations which qualities varied from refreshing to boring, sorry to say. Despite that, we gained an impression on what others were doing. Particularly we were encouraged by a few young researchers who had very unconventional ideas and prepared their presentations very well. Among them, Daniela Sangiorgi gave an informative historical overview on the development of service design. Nabil El Hilali focused on liminoid design. Besides these, we also enjoyed Paul Atkinson who talked about the wide-spread practice of amateur design and problematized the further professionalization of design. Wolfgang Jonas explored the concept of ‘form’ with ‘function’, ‘context’ and ‘medium’ and its implications for developing a set of descriptors for service design. We also presented our ongoing projects: new perspectives on design and use, and Case Transfer method which received valuable feedback, concerns and enlightening comments.

At the end of the conference, all delegates could nominate three papers for the second EAD Branco Best Paper Award and we look forward to witnessing our favourite peers receiving the 2,500 Euro prize.

Katharina Bredies & Rosan Chow