DRNetwork Forum: Steering Courses + Discourses

This one-day symposium took place at the Deutsche Telekom laboratories at Ernst-Reuter-Platz (the old Telefunken building) on Monday, November 16th, 02009. It was organised by Rosan Chow, and Joshua Marr created a stunning visual design for the flyers, invitation and other material.

The purpose of the event was to create a network of design researchers and foster a debate while at the same time serve design serve younger research students to get inspired by other methods & methodologies for Interaction Design, Design Management and Material Research. IMO this was a pretty key event and remarkable for a number of reasons. Until now events such as this have been pretty rare in Germany. Attending research conferences since 02001, this was the first research event I attended taking place in Germany. It's good to see that a high quality debate is kicking off there as well in younger academic circles.

This is astonishing for a number of reasons. Design research has been practised in Germany since at least the late 1950s e.g. at the Ulm School of Design (HfG Ulm), but somehow this knowledge never really received much of an international recognition outside expert circles. Either this is a result of the Ulmers being too early and ahead of their times, or being locked into the German language and thus not reaching a broader international public, or general documentation is either not available online or its texts not searchable.

Speakers were, in this order, Rosan Chow, Wolfgang Jonas, Gesche Joost, Michael Hohl, Ramia Mazé, Ana Margarida Ferreira, Andrew T. Walters and Sascha Peters.