Daniel Fällman, Umeå Institute of Design: The Design Research Group at Umeå Institute of Design

In this seminar, I will introduce the Design Research Group at Umeå Institute of Design. We are a truly multidisciplinary group—with competences ranging from industrial design to electronics engineering and from anthropology to computer science—aimed at conducting design research. During the seminar, I will present some of our recent projects to provide an overview as well as a few in-depth glimpses at what kinds of activities we are currently involved in.

I will allow some time during the seminar to talk about how we are organized and financed, as well as present my ideas on why we exist; whom we should support; and what design research could be about on a more general level.

Hopefully, this will give rise to discussions not only about issues concerning our work in the Design Research Group but also provide an example to which the research work currently being conducted at the Informatics department could be contrasted and discussed.