NERD 6th Sense

New Exper­i­men­tal Research in Design

The par­tic­u­lar epis­temic and inno­v­a­tive poten­tials of Design Research are increas­ing­ly rec­og­nized with­in the wider aca­d­e­m­ic sphere and are in con­stant­ly grow­ing demand by busi­ness­es, insti­tu­tions and pol­i­tics alike. Yet, design research also is a field and prac­tice that, due to its in-between nature, lacks the clear bound­aries and for­mal dog­ma­tisms of more tra­di­tion­al research dis­ci­plines, as well as their implic­it notions of secured knowl­edge and lin­ear progress.

Rec­og­niz­ing this inher­ent open­ness as one of its key qual­i­ties, the New Exper­i­men­tal Research in Design (in short: NERD) con­fer­ence aims at pro­vid­ing a gen­uine­ly diverse and open plat­form for dis­cussing, reflect­ing on and expos­ing to a wider pub­lic the man­i­fold ways in which design’s unique per­spec­tive and pro­fi­cien­cies can intel­li­gent­ly be applied as a research com­pe­tence. It does so by invit­ing pre­sen­ta­tions of empir­i­cal research projects by researchers from around the world and from all areas of design research with a focus on method­olog­i­cal­ly and the­mat­i­cal­ly orig­i­nal approaches.

The empha­sis on the empir­i­cal or the exper­i­men­tal is based on the con­vic­tion that the dis­cus­sion about the mer­its and pos­si­bil­i­ties of design research is one that has to be led by exam­ple: What con­sti­tutes a fruit­ful method or approach only becomes appar­ent by it actu­al­ly being con­cep­tu­al­ized, worked out and even­tu­al­ly put into prac­tice. For the same rea­son, NERD is decid­ed­ly not nar­rowed to a cer­tain top­ic or school of thought, since the qual­i­ta­tive­ly new often exceeds such pre­con­ceived categories.

Devel­oped and real­ized by BIRD, the Board of Inter­na­tion­al Research in Design for the epony­mous design research book series pub­lished by Birkhäuser, as an annu­al event with chang­ing venues, this con­fer­ence for­mat has already proven its pro­duc­tiv­i­ty five times.

Admis­sion to the con­fer­ence will be free of charge.

The con­fer­ence will be held in English.

bay­ern design is sup­port­ing the organ­i­sa­tion of this year’s NERD con­fer­ence in coop­er­a­tion with the Board of Inter­na­tion­al Research in Design (BIRD) and the Fac­ul­ty of Design at Augs­burg Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sciences.