[ ] With Design: Reinventing Design Modes

This collection stems from the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) congress in 2021, promoting the research of design in its many fields of application. Today's design finds itself at a critical moment where the conventional ‘modes’ of doing, thinking and application are increasingly challenged by the troubled ideology of globalisation, climate change, migration patterns and the rapid restructuring of locally driven manufacturing sectors. The volume presents a selection of papers on state-of-the-art design research work. As rapid technological development has been pushing and breaking new ground in society, the broad field of design is facing many unprecedented changes. In combination with the environmental, cultural, technological, and, crucially, pandemic transitions, design at large is called to fundamentally alter its modes of practice.  Beyond the conventional models of conducting research, or developing solutions to ‘wicked’ problems, the recoupling of design with different modes should be seen as an expression to embrace other capacities of thinking, criticisms and productions. This selection of proceedings papers delivers the latest insights into design from a multitude of perspectives, as reflected in the eight thematic modes of the congress ; i.e., [social] , [making] , [business] , [critical], [historical/projective], [impact], [pandemic], and [alternative] with design modes. The book benefits design researchers from both academia and industry who are interested in the latest design research results, as well as in innovative design research methods. In presenting an interesting corpus of design case studies as well as studies of design impact, this comprehensive collection is of relevance to design theorists and students, as well as scholars in related fields seeking to understand how design plays a critical role in their respective domains.

Dr Gerhard Bruyns is an architect and urbanist. He is Associate Professor of Environment and Interior Design, School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. His roles include Discipline Leader E&I and Convener of the PhD Programme. Previously Dr Bruyns held tenure as a faculty member of the Delft School of Design, Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology [TU Delft], the Netherlands. He has previously worked in practice in South Africa before joining the Urban Renewal and Management Chair of the TU Delft’s Department of Urbanism. In 2008 he was invited to join the Delft School of Design [TU Delft], an advanced research unit focused on combining critical theory, philosophy and design [architecture and urbanism] into a coherent MSc and PhD design program. Here Dr Bruyns’ role was to act as both a design mentor and MSc coordinator. Dr Bruyns has lectured at a number of universities globally, and acted as invited jury member to architecture schools in South Africa, Asia, South America, the US and Europe.


Dr. Huaxin Wei is an associate professor in the School of Design of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University where she teaches interaction design and game design. Her research centres on meaningful interactive experiences and investigates the ways they are enabled and the impacts they bring. The areas of her research interests include interactive digital narrative, game design and analysis, and human-computer interaction design. Dr. Wei's research on game narrative has resulted in a descriptive framework for analysing video games from a range of narrative perspectives. These perspectives have been demonstrated through game case analyses and theorisation in a series of publications in international academic journals, conferences, and books in games and game technology as well as interactive storytelling. Recently, she also started to research on tangible interaction design that facilitates memory practice and narrative experience, with initial results published in the ACM TEI (tangible, embedded and embodied interaction) conference. Dr. Huaxin Wei earned a PhD from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, Canada and a M.Sc. from the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Canada.