CONVERSATION: Researching Design in Policy and Governance: A Collective Reflection Through 60-Years of the Design Research Society Conference
Location: 50 George Square, G.06 (Room C1)
Design, policy and governance have been increasingly discussed across the 60-year history of the Design Research Society conferences. Examples of this can be found as early as the 1982 conference on design policy (Langdon & Purcell, 1984) and continue to this day. Over the last ten years we have witnessed these themes consolidate, accounting for almost 50 publications spread across, but not exclusively, among four different tracks (Feast, 2016; Leoni et al., 2024; Mortati et al., 2022; Schmidt & Mortati, 2024). A simple keyword search for design, policy, and governance in the DRS Digital Library returns over 1,100 results, pointing to the abundance and depth of work produced by the community over time.
To reflect on how design for policy and governance has evolved over these 60 years in the DRS community, we propose this conversation as a venue to collectively discuss what knowledge has been produced and how we could move forward. Recent initiatives, such as the 2024 track “Past, present, and future: Understanding the expanse of design for policy and governance” (Schmidt & Mortati, 2024), indicate a growing interest in revisiting and critically examining this trajectory. Building on these efforts, the conversation is guided by the following research questions:
● What themes, changes and tensions emerge from examining DRS publications and proceedings at the intersection of policy, governance, and design?
● How might collective critical examination inform future directions for policy, governance, and design in the DRS community?
● How does DRS, through its conference contributions, participate in shaping the relationship between design and governance as a research domain?
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