Design-STS Transverse Group

Design-STS Transverse Group

Emerging design practices for Sustainable Development Goals

To achieve sustainable development goals, actors are reinventing themselves, transforming their ways of working, changing their products, setting up original partnerships and organizing unprecedented concertation and collaborations. New materials are being designed, manufacturing methods are being rethought, and local and global public policies are being imagined and put into practice.

 The objective of the design-STS research group is to better understand these new design environments, practices, and dynamics related to sustainability. We look at new design materials: from living to AI. We study how new design methodologies can scale up local ecological initiatives to global national and international policies. We study how design methodologies can be more inclusive. We analyze the communicational and informational infrastructures that assist environmental and industrial transitions. We consider how visualization, representation, translation, mediation and consultation can support the emergence of new sustainable eco-systems and address issues of sciences to society. We also develop scenarios, proofs, of concept, mockups, simulations, of solutions that can address the increasing complexity of design issues. More generally, the Design-STS Research Group contributes to a reflection on the epistemology of design and its specific interdisciplinarity.

Artistic Research in Science & Technology Studies

The Design-STS Research Group group also fosters a research axis devoted to emerging practices in Science and Technology Studies (STS), with an emphasis on practice-based research, Art & Science as a research tool for critical thinking, and a focus on research objects investigated by the other ETIS teams.

STS Journal Club @ CY Alliance

The group hosts the STS Journal Club @ CY Alliance that is aimed at discussing STS and artistic-research related topics on a monthly basis. It is open to any member (including PhD Candidates and students) of CY Alliance. 

The program of the club is available here.

Group

Research areas

Axis 1
Agroecological transition, infrastructuring, and sciences to society

The axis aims at exploring and analyzing the capacity of design methods, models, and practices to produce the intellectual and practical framework necessary for agroecological transitions.

We want :

Axis 2
Emerging eco-systems

The new scales of innovations require a detailed understanding of intra- and inter-organizational strategies as well as a novel observation methodology to involve heterogeneous stakeholders but also to include many “unknowns”, as emerging systems are not fully defined. We want to explore the tools, representations, media that support the alignment of actors and their capacity to organize a common view of emerging eco-systems and the articulation of their knowledge and activities.

Axis 3
Design for territories

This research proposes to examine a new form of design that claims to be the design of territories. We want to identify the tools, methods and limits of these design practices and the way the actors use it and claim it. We assume that behind this unifying name there is a diversity of practices and justifications of public action. Comparing different structures should allow us to identify specificities and contribute to a typology of designs of territories.

Axis 4
Design and inclusion

This axis is devoted to addressing the many levels of inclusion: from technical, practical solutions to organization and urban development up to the design of inclusive public policies. The goal is to test how design can go beyond innovation at the object level and how codesign methods can address the different levels of inclusion.

This participatory research looks at the methodology of inclusive codesign and its impacts on the empowerment, enhancement of the social roles and inclusion of people with disabilities. In the light of visual impairment, new challenges arise for participation and codesign:

Axis 5
Emerging practices in Science and Technology Studies

This axis adresses the challenging aspects and endeavours linked to the development and consequences of information processing devices and systems, with an emphasis on research objects investigated by the four ETIS teams. Drawing from the interdisciplinary perspective of Science and Technology Studies, we develop new methodologies and tools that aims at building a critical approach to research in technology. This research specifically emphasises on the complexity of the surrounding ecosystem envisioned at various scales and in various contexts (technical, environmental, cultural, social and political).