OUT OF STUDIOS, ON TO SITES: TEMPORALITIES OF (DESIGN RESEARCH) LIVING LABS IN THE WILD

18-21 August 2026

Organizer(s):
Professor Thomas Binder
Associate Professor Tom Jenkins
Postdoctoral Fellow Anna-Mamusu Wehlitz

Lecturer(s):
Thomas Binder, Professor at ITU
Karey Helms, Associate Professor at Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden
Tom Jenkins, Associate Professor at ITU
Tau Lenskjold, Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark
Heidi Pietarinen, Professor at the University of Lapland, Finland

Date and Time:
18-21 August 2026: Full days

Room:TBD

Course description:
The Nordes summer school in 2026 invites design researchers to embed their work in a specific site and imagine how that site might change their work and the work might change the site’s future. More simply, site matters: Its particulars inform our research interests and aims, and our being there impacts particulars seen and unseen. This includes potential participants invited and not invited to engage, places remade to scaffold encounters, and outcomes framed to scope concerns among other things. In this way, perhaps starting with a site is not about what it might provide for design research, and instead about what doing design research does, regardless of what it intends to do.

We take a neighborhood in Copenhagen as both a living lab and proving ground for emerging design imaginaries. Sønderbro is a vibrant neighborhood in transition. Where there used to be fields with vegetables and livestock lies the public complex Hørgården. Next door, replacing small industries, cigar factories and workshops, a wide diversity of people are living today. The neighborhood has a tradition of taking care of those who are most disadvantaged—diversity and difference is the norm and connects neighbors together. There are fewer green spaces between the buildings. Still, vegetables and neighborliness grow in the neighborhood's three city gardens. A former machine hall is a meeting point for everything from a community kitchen, a new circus, food distribution, and swap markets.

Sønderbro offers a site for local fabulation, developing alternative imaginaries for how we might want to live and a way to investigate new forms of participation in design—as a thing, as an
arrangement, and as an investigation. This summer school imagines a design process as always being a matter of public concern, and positions design as a form of invitation to approach a question in novel as well as local ways, exploring the mundane adjacencies of research topics. Bringing design research out of the studio comes with a particular ethos and corresponding methodological and theoretical commitments that we will explore with co-organizers and invited lectures.

While the inquiry focuses on the advantages of leaving the studio, the summer school also has a production component. Exhibition is foregrounded throughout the process, as we learn about each other’s projects, filter them through a sited research-through-design process, and develop new materials that curate different modes of experiencing ongoing research.

Through the exhibition format, we draw out the temporality of design research within, upon, and without site. Within: the process; upon: the more standard exhibition—a “frozen” moment; and without: its traveling afterward, how it “ferments” and develops through interventions and experiments. This also specifically relates to us both being there as well as afterwards presenting, exhibiting, and discussing what was done, acknowledging the ongoingness of it.

We expect participants to gain a new perspective on their own research as inflected by the site, as well as a combination of public, expert, and collegial feedback on projects that can help propel the work forward. Further, by selecting only 20 participants, we hope to build a network of practitioners that can push the boundaries of design research and help to construct the practice in the future.

Programme:
The four days will be a mixture of lectures, site visits, seminars, making, critique and exhibition. Hands on making will be driven by research presentations and site thinking to develop and refine student projects.

Prerequisites:
PhD students at all levels and with all backgrounds can participate. However, the course might be most relevant for students who are familiar with codesign, speculative design and participatory design, and who have in their own projects been involved in open design (research) experiments.

Assessment:
Participants will prepare a position statement based on course readings before the course and use this position statement to anchor their project into the setting. Exhibition and critique will offer the basis for assessment, and we plan to submit a combined exhibition to the Nordic Design conference (Nordes) in 2027.

ECTS Points:
3 ECTS

Workload in hours:
Participation: 32 hours
Preparation: 41 hours
Evaluation: 10 hours

Participants:
20 Participants from different universities. If more than 20 apply, preference will be given based on project’s relevance to the course theme, affiliation with Nordic universities, and to students that work with/are part of underrepresented communities.

How to sign up:
You are asked to submit a proposal including a summary of your research project or practice and a brief argument for how the project relates (or might relate) to site and place. Proposals should be maximum one A4 page sent via email to nordes2026@gmail.com.