Digital Culture Research

Extra-Ordinary

Brooms turned into vacuum robots, analogue clocks into biometric machines; the past century has seen designers continuously rethink everyday objects and meanings. This hands-on design research course takes the quotidian as a point of departure to probe our increasingly dynamic world.

Students will practice thinking-through-making, approaching everyday objects as tools (human-centered design); as sites of experience (phenomenology, embodied interaction); or as portals to reimagined realities and ecologies (critical design, posthuman thought). By experimenting with the ordinary and its evolving conceptualizations, students will sharpen their perspective on design across aesthetic, ethical, and material dimensions.

By the end of the course, students will have developed a series of research artifacts forming both critical probes for our everyday in present and propositions for its future design.

Carrying forward a living inventory of design research approaches, students will concurrently join George Perec in his question (1973): "Approaches to What?"