Keynote Speakers
Simon
Biggs
Research Professor, Edinburgh College of Art
This keynote will present three examples of creative
interdisciplinary research the artist has been involved in.
The projects discussed cover a period of 25 years,
demonstrating how the character of such interdisciplinary
practice and research has evolved. The presentation will be
supported by software, digital video and still image
documentation.
A key insight drawn from these three distinct but connected
examples of interdisciplinary research notes how work across
disciplines and between specialists can lead to unexpected
outcomes and how these can iteratively inform the
development of the researcher’s and practitioner’s work in
their respective disciplines.
Nathan Crilly
University of Cambridge
This talk will promote the use of scholarly approaches to
design research, especially the practice of reading across
disciplinary boundaries. Three different research projects
will be reviewed in which ideas were drawn from a broad
range of academic fields, including communication theory,
diagram theory, philosophy of art, philosophy of science,
linguistics, law, sociology and psychology. Against the
background of these three projects, issues relating to the
practice of design research will be discussed. In
particular, we will address the need for interdisciplinarity,
the challenges it brings and the benefits it offers. The
talk will conclude by suggesting that reading across
disciplinary boundaries is necessary to many aspects of
design research, and that despite the difficulties involved,
it can yield a better informed perspective on design.
Martyn Dade-Robertson
Whilst the virtues of interdisciplinary research are well known and
the function of Design as a bridging discipline is well discussed,
there is a tendency of people within the design discipline to engage
in the rhetoric of pattern matching. My own experience in the field
of ‘information architecture’ has lead to a number of conclusions about
the dangers of pattern matching and as a result in my own research I have
sought to develop methods which find the roots of terminology and disciplinary
specialisation in order to find deep and hidden relationships between disciplines.
This paper will detail some of this research with reference to information
visualisation, the design of graphical user interfaces, the pre-history of
architecture and the relationship of buildings to categorisation systems.
