Welcome to the 2010 Design Research Society (DRS) international conference Design & Complexity to be held July 7-9, 2010 in Montreal (Quebec), Canada, at the School of Industrial Design, Université de Montréal.

DRS 2010 is open to the whole range of design disciplines and contemporary inquiries in design. The theme of Design & Complexity should be understood as a springboard for sharing ideas and concepts about contemporary design research.

We propose to the community of design researchers to think and report on complexity as it is encountered in a variety of the designed product, experience or service:

1. In the conception phase, the complexity of design lies in the many parameters or criteria that shape the designed product, experience or service: technical, ergonomic, aesthetic, cultural, symbolic, economic, etc. Another level of complexity lays in the design processes which respond to complex logics that are not easily put into an axiomatic formula (creative phases, imagination, reflection-in-action, etc). Finally, there is the actors’ dynamic (including the designer) which is the result of the interplay of rhetoric, negotiation, power plays, values, knowledge, ideology, and so on.

2. When considering the reception of designed products, experience and services, design is faced with understandings of the users that far exceed any single disciplinary model that has been proposed so far, by the likes of cognitive or behavioural sciences, cultural anthropology, microeconomics, semiotics, etc. In the designing disciplines, these models have failed more often than not to be completely relevant to practices: How can we account simultaneously for man as a sensible, emotional, rational, embodied being, requiring a viable material and immaterial world?

Therefore, to design, to educate a future designer or to conduct research activities in the field of design in 2010 requires complex approaches to a variety of issues and phenomena. DRS 2010 will offer participants of all horizons the opportunity to share their point of view regarding (1) the complexity of issues and phenomena in design or (2) the complex approaches developed in their response.

Since DRS 2010 will be held in a French speaking city and university, DRS 2010 will exceptionally welcome contributions in French.
Pour plus d’information, consultez l’invitation en français.