Research through design (RTD) considers design action as a generator of knowledge. A First-Person Perspective (1PP) approach to RTD (1PP-RTD) acknowledges it and works to afford new ways of understanding the situated experience of others, by foregrounding the designer’s own — situated, embodied and personally implicated — experience. A 1PP stance positions designers within communities. It situates and gives meaning to locally conducted research; accounts for individual and communal situated experience; and empowers diverse, often marginalised actors in bottom-up and top-down transformation processes, using materials at hand. As a way of working, 1PP-RTD embodies a commitment to phenomenologically-grounded meaning-making.
In this workshop designers will focus on their practice-based research in, on, around and through their situated bodily experience. When taking a 1PP approach to RTD, the act of designing becomes personal. The designers design for themselves, and share their outcomes; or designs for their community from within. These ways of designing require continually reassessing relationships that arise between people, places and purpose, to better understand and respond to the complex interplay of needs and values in-situ. The stance legitimises multi-species stakeholder experience in socio-ecological transformation and, we argue, can transform outcomes across research, education and industry.
The workshop will consist of an individual and a group 1PP design intervention (situated design activity) and guided reflections in order to make sense of 1PP-RTD, understand its challenges and explore how to scale it up to achieve social, economic and ecological impact.
Dr. Oscar Tomico Plasencia,
ELISAVA Design and Engineering
School, Barcelona, Spain and
Eindhoven University of Technology,
the Netherlands.
Yaniv Brafman, Industrial Design
Department, HIT.
