I am fascinated by societal transformation processes, and aim to contribute to alternative, more sustainable ways of engaging in society, through design.
My research perspective focuses on embracing the complexity of our everyday: our entanglement within communities, institutions, and political and technological systems that mediate our understanding, actions and behaviours.
I love working with graphical design and art to move beyond cognitive ways of knowing and move toward embodied sense-making and aesthetic engagement.
Publications
I have been able to contribute to various publications within the design research community and worked with methodological and theoretical frameworks to understand and disseminate design research processes.
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Coppola, Maria & Veen, Rosa & Trotto, Ambra. (2022). The Local Climate Contract. DIID. 1. 10.30682/diid7822i.
This work explores how designerly practices drawing from embodied sensemaking, can foster actionable systemic perspectives that allow for co-response-ability in the formulation of a Climate City Contract in the city of Umeå, Sweden. The paper describes the design and facilitation process of 3 cross-disciplinary roundtable conversations that build on notions of thriving together, making kin and commoning.
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Trotto, A., Hummels, C. C., Levy, P. D., Peeters, J. P., van der Veen, R., Yoo, D., ... & van der Zwan, S. (2021). Designing for Transforming Practices: Maps and Journeys.
This book has been published based on the work done by Caroline Hummels, Ambra Trotto, Pierre Lévy and Jeroen Peeters. I have been able to contribute with a one pager about my M21 process, where I designed a process for shaping the business offer within one of the units in RISE.here
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Peeters, J., van der Veen, R., & Trotto, A. (2020, July). Pictorial Unleashed: Into the Folds of Interactive Qualities. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 925-938).
In this pictorial, we focus on the interactive qualities of the two designs and we propose a way to invite the reader to actively and physically engage with the pages of this publication. The reader is asked to print the pages of this pictorial and to engage in folding sequences on particular pages in order to actively engage with the different ways of interacting between the two different designs. goes here
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Van Der Veen, R., Peeters, J., Långström, O., Helgers, R., Papworth, N., & Trotto, A. (2019, March). Exploring Craft in the Context of Digital Fabrication. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 237-242).
In this work in progress, we start to unpack the act of making in a digital fabrication process - 3D printing. 3D printing is typically considered to be highly automated, however, in this process, an interesting tension exists between our skills, the properties of a novel material and the capabilities of a novel machine emerged. In this research we start to explore how we might explain the embodied act of making in the context of digital fabrication through the lense of ambiguity and resistance, notions previously used to unravel craftsmanship.
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Peeters, J., van der Veen, R., Helgers, R., Långström, O., Bambi, M., Papworth, N., & Trotto, A. (2019). Resisting Plastics for Ambiguous Results. In Research through Design.
This publication contributes to the development of a new additive manufacturing method, and increases our awareness of what factors and forces are at play in this new additive manufacturing method, in which the development of the designer’s tacit skills have been articulated more explicitly.
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Van der Veen, R., Peeters, J., & Trotto, A. (2018, March). Charged utopia VR: exploring embodied sense-making in the virtual space. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 292-298).
This paper reports on preliminary results of a design research project that explores how spaces in virtual reality may be designed to build on qualities of embodied sensemaking.
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van der Veen, R., Hakkerainen, V., Peeters, J., & Trotto, A. (2018, March). Understanding transformations through design: can resilience thinking help?. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 694-702).
This paper aims at understanding transformation ignited by a particular constructive design research project. Our intention is to set out how the notion of resilience might provide a new perspective to understand how constructive design research may produce results that have a sustainable social impact.
Vision
Designing is about proposing ways to engage with and in this world. It is about proposing ways to interact, to see, to connect, to understand and to act. Design therefore has the potential to transform our current practices.
In the past decade, the design practice has expanded its practice from product design toward policy, governance, and system design, as this transformational capacity has been acknowledged to be useful in navigating todays’ complex societal challenges. My drive is to support societal transformational processes within these contexts, to move towards more sustainable, humane, nuanced and equal practices in our everyday lives.
The painful aspect of designing for complex societal challenges is the act of making choices that will never fully capture the complexity of the contexts. However, acknowledging this throughout the process, allows for a practice that embodies learning, transforming, and reframing.
Rather than trying to uncover a universal ‘truth’ about how something should be, design allows for explorations in different directions, uncovering how things could be. The design practice proposes ways to embrace the complexity of contexts without getting stuck in this complexity.
Through continuous exploration, the practice moves through the contexts of complex challenges and uncovers needs, desires, values, clashes, difference and commonalities and propose ways to go about them.
This constructive quality of design distinguishes itself from more cognitive ways of perceiving the world. The design practice is inherently situated and subjective, since it operates within the contexts of peoples’ experience, values, histories, hopes and dreams. It utilizes the plurality of these different perspectives as a material to work with, to learn from each other, to reflect and to co-develop ways to take a next step. Design thus allows for variation, divergence, and plurality, through the converging act of designing proposals, making decisions and proposing possible ways forward. I believe design could therefore be a valuable practice in our increasingly polarized society, bridging different perspectives through experienceable future scenarios, being a humble force for constructive dialogues that reinforce learning and collaborative practices.
Identity
In my design processes I try to cultivate environments were new insights & perspectives can emerge, where a plurality of perspectives can co-exist, and whereby engaging with these perspectives allows for a collaborative effort to imagine what could be.
My way of working does not aim for finalised solutions. Instead, I focus on opening up new perspectives through the process of designing: Considering the whole design process as a transformative journey.
Through an exploratory approach I keep an open mindset and embrace the complexity of the challenges that I am confronted with;
I engage with theory and literature as well as practical hands-on prototyping, to navigate, understand and unravel the context I am working in;
By working with tailor made design processes that depend on the context, I work with the situatedness of challenges, looking at the context in which a certain challenge appears;
Through reflection in and on action, I acknowledge my own position, assumption and biases;
By emphasizing the personal & subjective I create space for a plurality of perspectives to co-exist;
I design with ambiguous qualities, creating room for appropriation, interpretation and imagination;
Through working with embodied formats, I materialize ways for new ideas, possibilities and opportunities to be formulated;
Through participatory and collaborative processes, I design to cultivate a feeling of courage: courage to reflect, to unlearn, to learn, and to ultimately, transform.