GOOD19
GOOD19 was the most recent edition in a series of international conferences named the ‘Great Outdoors Of Design’. This event brings design researchers from all around the world together to reflect on their research practices, by encouraging them to look at their own practice with a new perspective. This year the conference was focused on the topic of Considerate Transformation.
This theme touches on how design research cultivates a strong collaborative effort that involves ongoing experimentation, reflection and learning. Empathic conversations between design researchers, research participants and organisations in search for a deeper understanding of needs, preferences and motivations are at the core of creating meaningful change. Throughout the conference special attention was paid at connecting issues from the fields of Care, Work and Planet to all the workshops and keynote speeches.
The two keynote speakers for GOOD19 were
Sophie Thomas from Thomas.Matthews (London) and Richard van der Laken from What Design Can Do (Amsterdam).
Sophie shared her experience of becoming a design activist. She described how she developed her sustainable design practice, and gradually focused her attention specially on awareness of the impact of plastics & waste. Her development as a designer, a researcher and an activist inspired the audience to reflect on their own practices and how their believes as researchers can shape the world and the design team they work with.
Richard told the story that sparked What Design Can Do, an international platform showcasing the impact of design on transforming society in cities around the world: Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, New Delhi and Nairobi. His presentation triggered discussion around the differences between local and global design practice and the challenges and the opportunities we face together as design researchers around the global.
The conference programme also consisted of two sets of collaborative workshop sessions on the following topics:
- Designing (and surviving) for the end of life
- Fostering local narratives to build resilience
- Redefining communities through entrepreneurship
- Encouraging behaviours that make meaningful work
- Facing global climate challenges with local interventions
- Inspiring reflective practices among professionals
- Converting stakeholder resistance into engagement
- Empowering people to take charge in care
Each session was hosted by REACH partners from different locations, sharing stories and insights they encounter in their current design research practices (see details of the program here). The sessions were designed to encourage multi-directional conversations amongst the participants, based on the input provided by the hosts. The sessions sparked stimulative and reflective conversations amongst the researchers. The participants were able to share their own research stories and discuss on a constructive basis what their role is and can be.Many participants described this event as the most inspirational event they had in the year. One specifically described it as ‘a safe place for design researchers to share their honest reflections on not only the work they do but also on the principles underpinning how they do it’.The GOOD conference is not a regular conference that comes around every year at a set time, it is organised by the REACH network, but the time and location of the next conference are not set in time.