A workshop is a 90-minute long, facilitated interactive session for groups of up to 18 people, of learning through doing to explore ideas, practices, understanding and new methods.  They offer the opportunity for researchers (early career and more experienced) to work in a highly interactive manner to validate research, try out a new approach, collaborate on the construction of something new or any other activity.

EAD2019 has ten exciting workshops being presented over the three days of conference – they will explore new insights of design and associated research and will spark debate.

The workshops will run parallel with the eight Track sessions morning and afternoon – you can attend one or the other. see full programme >

You will find a summary of each below and the option to book your place in advance – numbers are limited to 18 and will be offered on a first come first served basis.

The academic disciplines and practices of design and health currently operate within different spaces and draw on disparate paradigms relating to how knowledge is created and disseminated. Whilst the value of bringing design and health together is increasingly being recognised the reality is that this can be fraught with complexity. Within design for instance, disruption and risk are regarded as creative catalysts, which can lead to the generation of new insights. Within healthcare risk is frequently seen as a negative force and to be avoided at all costs. This interactive workshop based around a series of crafted challenges offers participants the opportunity to explore these tensions and to work together to identify different routes and ways forwards.

Presented at Dalhousie on the morning of Wednesday 10 April

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This workshop will present and validate the usefulness of a framework for improving knowledge exchange (KE) tools. We propose an improvement framework, where participants collaboratively improve the functions, instructions and flexibility of tools to develop their engagement practices. In this workshop, we will lead participants through a creative engagement activity, where participants will learn through doing how to improve KE tools within a collaborative improvement framework. The potential workshop outcomes are new knowledge and tool ideas as a result of a collective and fruitful experience among participants. Participants will gain new knowledge on how to improve the engagement with groups of non-designers through the improvement of KE tools and other tools, such as participatory tools. Further research involves inviting participants to take part in a research study on the potential applications of the improvement framework to their own work.

Presented at Dalhousie on the morning of Wednesday 10 April

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Being agile is a hot topic in the design industry today. However, within product design there are many challenges to be faced when becoming more agile. One of the barriers is that conducting research with users in a traditional way can be time consuming and costly. Demands from the agile movement are pushing those in industry to come up with better and more efficient ways of keeping users in the loop throughout the design process. This workshop introduces participants to digital agile communities. This is a tool used by researchers and designers to iteratively ‘check in’ with users, test ideas and respond to user feedback. Participants will interact with a live digital agile community, sharing their own design sketches generated in the session with real users. The intention of the workshop is for participants to engage with a new tool and inspire discussion into agile research methods for product design.

Presented at Dalhousie on the afternoon of Wednesday 11 April

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This workshop is concerned with the relationship between food and global health, and in particular with the role that design can play as a futuring practice (Fry, 2008). Industrial food and food practices have contributed to both human and planetary ill-being. This has been captured well in UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which are linked directly or indirectly to food. The proposed workshop will employ speculative design, to engage participants in developing a menu of provocative solutions that would help the design community identify and map possible direction for design research in the areas of food, design and global health. The workshop outcomes will include a visual workshop report to be published on the EAD website, an illustrated menu of provocative speculative design solutions that map future food/design directions and a Little Book of ‘Speculative Design Food Futures’.

Presented at Dalhousie on the afternoon of Wednesday 10 April

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Collaborations between the fields of Design and Healthcare often involve navigating epistemological differences in terms of what is considered robust ‘evidence.’ Whilst Design approaches are gaining traction in healthcare contexts, the scientific paradigm of evaluation remains in a privileged position. This creates a challenge for designers working in healthcare, but also an opportunity. This workshop aims to explore the role of Design in expanding understanding of impact of medical interventions, products or services beyond traditional (and dominant) quantitative methods, towards broader, experiential and contextualised outcome measures. By focusing on the context of child prosthetics as a particularly risk-laden area of investigation, participants can expect a fast-paced, interactive and collaborative session. By maintaining a focus on learning through making, participants will be invited to share their own experiences as well as imagine new ways of supporting young patients and family members in communicating the complex, real-world impacts of their medical devices.

Presented at Dalhousie on the morning of Thursday 11 April

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Design and its practitioners use many methodologies, methods, mindsets, manuals and motives. There is a plethora of documentation that focuses on defining, categorising and theorising these aspects of Design, how they came to be and what should be taken from them. However, what happens if we turn these tools on ourselves and try to design and imagine other forms, concepts, manifestations of design itself? ‘Design’ as the topic, ‘design practitioners’ as the users and ‘the designed’ as methods, mindsets, beliefs and so on. The outcomes of these curiosity-led activities are not predefined or that predictable, they rely on providing tasks and tools to ignite inquisitiveness and lay the groundwork for serendipity and unexpected occurrences. The participants will leave with more curiosity about what Design can be, leading to new questions about the discipline and its practices.

Presented at Dalhousie on the morning of Thursday 11 April

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The language of nature is embedded in the way we speak, name things, create architectural constructions or develop new materials to thrive as specie. The ecological, sustainable or the biologically-inspired design definitions are signs of a collective intelligence. Searching new educational ways to rediscover and implement nature´s strategies is helping us to redefine a new ethic for the designer, a Nature-Centered one. This workshop is intended to provide an initial exploration of how design academics and researchers understand and find an accurate meaning of Nature-Centered Design (NX) by creating a speculative syllabus content. Through mixed methods it will be divided in two sections and conducted in a close-to-nature setting.

Presented at Dundee Botanic Gardens on the afternoon of Thursday 11 April (transport will be provided)

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Our workshop addresses how research and design intertwine and also place and look for a clear position one from each other. The main objective of the WK is to question respective positions of the researcher and the designer and to understand how research and design distinguish each other but also seek complementarities. More specifically, we propose to experiment ‘productive disagreement’ during the WK in order to foster respective position and identity (skills, competences) and mutual contribution. The methodology will be based on sensible insights, ethnographic approach and participatory observation, visual and creative methodologies (role-play, hand drawing, diagrams, system maps). Designers and researchers are invited to participate and will be involved in the design process of the workshop.

Presented at Dalhousie on the afternoon of Thursday 11 April

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This workshop provides participants with the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the Behavioural Lenses Approach and Toolkit. This toolkit supports designers in using theory from the behavioural sciences to inform their work and substantiate their choices. The workshop consists of an introduction to the toolkit and a couple of hands-on exercises in which we will demonstrate and try out the toolkit in establishing use(r) contexts in behavioural design projects. Furthermore, participants will try out a new prototype tool that supports making an evidence-based transition from user insights to behavioural change strategies.

Presented at Dalhousie on the morning of Friday 12 April

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Biomimicry is a practice that seeks to translate nature’s strategies into sustainable solutions. The emerging discipline has the potential to become a leading approach for sustainable design. When it comes to drawing inspiration from nature, nothing beats an up-close study of real-life plants and animals. While metropolitan regions may be far from wildlife preserves and natural habitats, they still offer tremendous troves of biodiversity: the neatly organized collections of natural history museums. These collections contain organisms ranging from insects and birds to plants and reptiles, bringing biological inspiration from around the world to the fingertips of designers. This workshop will introduce participants to the hidden design possibilities of natural history museums.

Presented at the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum on the morning of Friday 12 April (a short walk from Dalhousie)

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