DesignLAB blog

How could designerly thinking encourage transdisciplinary collaboration in academia, providing an ontological ground for ‘tentacular’ research engagement? Could we think collectively about activating design tools and methods to intertwine generative intersections and multiplicity of discourses within social sciences research? Design Tools for Social Sciences Workshops Series was proposed by DesignLAB at the School of Architecture and Landscape to create platforms of engagement to address these questions, to build on the internal tendencies for trans-disciplinary research and scholarship within the School and eventually to open up to wider participation. 

DesignLAB organised the Design Tools for Social Sciences workshop series in collaboration with the Department of Geography, School of Education, Politics and International Relations, Urban Institute and Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. The workshops focused on three themes:  Coproduction, Care and Futures. These themes were generated as an outcome of an internal research and scholarship interests workshop to map the ecologies of design practices at the School.

The first workshop of the Design Tools for Social Sciences series, titled Design & Coproduction, was organised by DesignLAB (School of Architecture) in collaboration with the Department of Geography, School of Education, Politics and International Relations, Urban Institute, and Urban Studies and Planning, and co-chaired by Doina Petrescu (Architecture), Dorothea Kleine (Geography & Institute for Global Sustainable Development) & Hita Unnikrishnan (Urban Institute). The workshop was curated around five strands/perspectives at the intersection of ‘design’ and ‘co-production’: Technological perspective, gender perspective, cross-cultural perspective, practice-based and pedagogical perspectives. Academics from the collaborating departments and from outside the University of Sheffield were invited to present interventions that focused on engagements with diverse design methods and ethical organisations of knowledge production for generating change within researched contexts, communities and ecologies. 

The workshop started with the introduction of DesignLAB and its objectives by DesignLAB co-curators Doina Petrescu, Tanzil Shafique & Esra Can (Architecture). The first session involved six presentations on the theme Co-production Tools and Methods: Technological perspectives by Dr Felipe Lanuza (Architecture) & Dr Suvodeep Mazumdaar (Information School), Gender justice in digital innovation by Prof Dorothea Kleine (Geography & IGSD), Codesign in Practice and community projects, by Prof Doina Petrescu & Andrew Belfield (Architecture) and cross-cultural perspective by Prof Beth Perry (Urban Institute) & Rike Sitas (University of Cape Town). 

Presenters offered a series of design tools and case studies informed by coproduction. Technological perspectives involved two interventions: We started with the game ZeroCity+, an urban digital and analogue game presented by Felipe, developed as a participatory platform for people, local authorities and stakeholders to develop a collective understanding of net zero strategies and environmental care at a neighbourhood scale.  Suvodeep’s presentation of tools and methods employed a context-specific and purpose-driven technology, suggesting both technical (such as improved efficiencies, vision demonstrators, proof of concept, publications etc. and inspiration for future projects, source code for the future, datasets released etc.) and non-technical roles (sense of co-ownership of the technology, opening ‘doors’ within the community, shaping ‘futures’ and envisioning as power and learning for the future). Gender Justice and Digital Innovation talk by Dorothea Kleine presented intergenerational and gender-specific aspects of coproduction as designed, observed, and experienced during engagements with several localities organised as part of projects of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, including AfriCultuReS, GeDIA and GeJuSTA. Dorothea concluded by highlighting the need for research toolkits for gender-just co-design. Practice-based perspectives involved two presentations by Doina Petrescu and Andrew Belfield, focusing on 'urban living labs' as a design approach for facilitating user engagement in a real-life setting. Doina shared her situated practice of developing R-Urban Agrocite, Bagneux as a hybrid ‘civic -organic’ resilience hub in Paris and Andrew focused on R-Urban Poplar in London where co-design is practised as a site for civic pedagogy. The cross-cultural perspective provided us with an engaging and honest reflection on Beth and Rike’s experience of co-production and international partnerships/collaborations, discussing the challenges of institutional frameworks for supporting informal and on-the-ground action, especially when such engagement is established between the Global North and Global South positions. 

The final session was organised as a 'Co-production Marketplace' set around five strands, allowing participants to ask their questions, make relations with their own research and reflect on possibilities of future collaborations. We also used this time as an opportunity to collect topics of interest, questions, methods and references that could inform future activities of DesignLAB. 

The second workshop of the Design Tools for Social Sciences series, titled Design & Care, was organised by DesignLAB (School of Architecture) in collaboration with the Department of Geography, School of Education, Politics and International Relations, Urban Institute, and Urban Studies and Planning, and co-chaired by Krzysztof Navratek (Architecture), Rowland Atkinson (Urban Studies and Planning) and Youcao Ren (Architecture).

The workshop focused on care as an overarching theme for exploring design methods and interventions and ethical organisations of knowledge production for generating change within researched contexts, communities and ecologies. It was organised around two sessions: Design and Care Perspectives and Design Workshop. 

Introduction by the workshop convenors invited the participants to consider care across two scales: Rowland introduced a conception of care that is community-oriented, informing the social and spatial politics and supporting a reimagination of civic infrastructures that could resist the ongoing neoliberal pressures. Youcao and Krzysztof led a warm-up activity to trace care in the everyday maintenance of the event space. 

In the first session, Dr Daryl Martin’s (University of York) talk on Maggie’s Centres as a space for ‘encountering care’ presented us with a sociological perspective of care as observed, experienced and designed in what he calls the therapeutic space. Dr Youcao Ren explored the ‘myth of modern sanitation’ from the perspective of uncaring universal access. Her focus on sanitation systems and their interaction with other social, technical and environmental systems revealed critical questions on gender equality and sustainable cities to inform sanitation design, planning and maintenance. 

The second session was organised as a ‘design workshop’ for collective experiments with design-based approaches, methods and tools. Two provocations posed questions for such experimentation: Dr Meesha Warmington (School of Education) asked five questions that emerged from her research on the ‘Bilingual Brain and Ageing’: 

Spatial Design, Attention and Switching: Can architectural design be used to create environments that promote focus and minimise distractions, potentially mimicking the cognitive benefits of bilingualism?

Memory and Functional Spaces for Learning: Can architecture design be used to create learning environments that are not only functional but also promote memory and knowledge retention?

Designing for Cognitive Diversity: Can the findings of this study be used to design spaces that are adaptable and cater to the diverse cognitive needs of individuals?

"Cognitive Offloading": Can physical environments be designed to take on some of the cognitive load typically placed on the brain? Can architectural design be used to support tasks requiring working memory or attention in bilingual or monolingual individuals?

Potential application of "neuroarchitecture": How can this research on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism inform the principles of neuroarchitecture in creating spaces that promote well-being and cognitive performance? 

This table’s reflections on design tools for addressing ‘cognition’ highlighted the need for approaches that will accommodate difference as a caring act. Some of the proposed methods included employing multi-sensory design methods, experimenting with prototyping as a design tool, addressing culture and adaptability as design criteria, and posing critical questions such as “Who else should be there?” to enable inclusive and responsive design processes. 

Prof Rowland Atkinson posed three discussion points emerging from his research on the ‘Uncaring Urban Realm’: Necrotecture, Libertecture and Ultratecture: 

1. To what extent should design professionals allow themselves to be co-opted by the needs of capital to produce socially sterile and sterilising spaces that cater to the needs of capital or wealthy clients?

2. How should design elements of physical space and buildings be tackled in terms of social/moral calculations within academic work on inequalities in urban settings?

3. What kinds of projects, ideas or concepts can be formulated that offer a bridge between design and urban sociology/studies?

Reflections on this table highlighted design approaches such as degrowth, retrofitting and repair in countering affective urban and architectural enclosures, and the need to integrate critical design thinking addressing urban finance, value and ethos - both in training/curriculum and public architecture.

The final workshop of the Design Tools for Social Sciences workshop series, titled 'Design & Futures’, was organised by our DesignLAB in collaboration with the Departments of Geography, School of Education, Politics and International Relations, Urban Institute, and Urban Studies and Planning, and co-chaired by Tanzil Shafique (Architecture) and Beth Perry (Urban Institute).

This workshop explored the interface between the multiplicitous notion of the future and the engagement of design tools in speculating, projecting, investigating, and critiquing such futures. The explored tools and approaches ranged from speculative design studio for co-creative thinking, exploration of digital tools from a critical perspective, simulation of future phases, art-based storyboarding and participatory tools. A mix of academics from various disciplines shared their 10-minute provocations thematically. 

The workshop introduction was delivered by Tanzil Shafique, where he presented futures as a design and research framework for imagining, exploring, visiting and investigating towards building possibilities. He posed five questions for the invited presenters to explore how they ‘future’:

How do you operationalise the notion of the future in your work? 

How does futurism or futuring form an analytical lens? 

What type of methods do you use to project a future?  

How can we benefit from a common interdisciplinary understanding of how futures are made/unmade? What are the entanglements of justice within futures and design?

Dan Jary and Emre Akbil’s (Architecture) intervention for the theme Pedagogical Futures explored Design Studio as a Site of Learning in Uncertain Futures as a framework for collective, projective, speculative and affirmative learnings. For the theme Digital Futures, Vidya Pancholi (University of Lancaster) presented a decolonial and justice perspective on digitalised climate change adaptation, explored through the project titled Digital Climate Futures. Tim Ireland’s (Architecture) intervention for the theme Computational Futures presented us with a future where architecture is both computational and biological and highlighted the role of our understanding of the natural world and processes of its generation and organisation to be a main drive for such transition. Katherine Easton (Education) presented digiware project for the theme Visioning Futures where she explored future imaginaries of utopian and dystopian school as envisioned by local students by using several tools such as case files, detective fact sheets, flashcards, day in the life exercise and with characters and storyboards. For the theme Participatory Futures, Renata Tyszczuk & Ashley Mason (Architecture) presented Climate ReAssemblies as a platform for collaborating with citizens in South Yorkshire in creating collective future scenarios as a method to reconfigure citizen engagement with climate change policy. 

The second session was organised as Futures Marketplace where workshop participants had the opportunity to bring their own research/teaching/engagement agenda to utilise the various provocations/tools/case studies put forward by the presenters. The breadth of presentations and discussions in this third and last workshop left the participants and DesignLAB members with the need to engage more with each others’ work to reconnect and find intersecting threads for future collaboration.