Design Culture Events

Unfolding Design Culture: practical investigations explores possibilities for a new praxis of design and enquiry

It asks what might it be for specialists whose work aligns partially or fully with Design Culture Studies (DCS) to actually practice in design? Put differently, how can those who normally undertake analytical research or teach in service mode to design, generate their own forms of creative practice? How might they engage publics differently? And how can they take design interventions beyond standard formats of ‘the project’ and beyond solutionist conventions?

The symposium brings together an international group of researchers, writers, historians, curators and designers who apply their creative skills towards open-ended enquiry. It is conceived to collectively explore how practicing design culture as a post-solutionist sensibility generates zones of mutual uncertainty among actors, including design practitioners, so as to generate new insights, processes and objects. 

The event is convened by Guy Julier and Eeva Berglund, professors in the Department of Design at Aalto University. It is supported through the Design Culture Research Group in the Department of Design, Aalto University and additional funding from the department’s Creative Practices and Visibility programmes. 

Programme

Thursday 3 September

9.30 Introduction: Guy Julier, Aalto University Co-leaders of the Design Culture Research group 

Situating design culture as…

10.00 Session 1

Emanuele Quinz, Paris 8 University, EnsadLab-PSL

The research condition: notes on counter-disciplinary practices

Kat Jungnickel, Goldsmiths, University of London

Invisible inventors and DIY design cultures:  how (and why) ordinary people make extra-ordinary things

Discussion

Nastasia Fomina, Aalto University

Designing conditions for uncomfortable conversations

Nathaly Pinto, Aalto University

Sustaining design culture as practice:  making pictograms with indigenous youth otherwise, over time.

12.15 Session 2

Ulises Navarro Aguiar, University of Gothenburg

Thinking/practicing DCS by problematizing value

Lucy Kimbell, University of Arts, London

Policy uncertainties and design practices 

13.00 Lunch

14.15 Interlude: Eeva Berglund, Aalto University

Ethnographic experimentation and research as invitation

14.30 Session 3

Harun Kaygan, University of Southern Denmark

The inward turn in design:  five embodied metaphors for design practice

Emilia Tikka, TikkaStudio, Basel

Design as intercosmological practice. collaborative imaginaries for postcolonial technosciences 

Enya Moore, University of Sidney

FieldPress:  a mobile printmaking device for relational practice 

15.45 Session 4

Elise Simonssen, Aalto University

How can a podcast function as a research tool and a source of data that combines design practice and research?

Xavier Acarín Wieland, Barcelona

The city is a museum, designing collective forms

16.45 Plenary Discussion

17.15 Closing

Friday 4 September

9.30 Session 5

Delphine Rumo, Aalto University

Thinking with soils and rocks – design culture as a practice of material inquiry

Tomas Criado (online), Open University of Catalonia

Probing in the dark: collective speculations in a field of shades

Sini Rinne-Kanto, Paris 8 University

Designing a self-run space: pragmatism, opportunism and reflexivity

11.00 Closing

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Xavier Acarín Wieland is a curator and researcher interested in material performativity, urban studies and exhibition histories. His exhibitions and projects have been presented at different venues, among them, Elastic City, The Abrons Arts Center, Knockdown Center, Wendy's Subway, or PS122 Gallery in New York; La Ira de Dios in Buenos Aires; HIAP and Muu Gallery in Helsinki; and at the Mies van der Rohe Pavillion, Caixaforum, ADN Gallery, and La Capella in Barcelona. He is a co-author of three books Experience Design (Bloomsbury, 2014), Dear Helen (CCS Bard, 2014), and Davant la Imatge (BRAC-Comanegra, 2016), and his study of the Social Museum of Barcelona was published in 2024 as part of the Museu Habitat program. Xavier holds an MA in Museum Studies from New York University, an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and is now completing his PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is now based in Barcelona, teaching at EINA and collaborating as a curator at the Historic Archive of Poblenou for the Barcelona 2026, World Capital of Architecture program.

Tomás Criado is an anthropologist and STS scholar, especially interested in urban environmental phenomena. He works as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the CareNet group of the Social and Cultural Transformations Interdisciplinary Research Centre (TRÀNSIC) at the Open University of Catalonia. In his ethnographic and public engagement work, he has inquired on different forms of material and knowledge politics in environments where care is invoked as a mode of urban intervention: either as a peculiar form of techno-scientific activism (democratising knowledge, design practices and infrastructures) or as a practice of articulating peculiar ecologies of support (accessible and late life urbanism, urban heat mitigation plans, multispecies architecture).

Nastasia Fomina is a doctoral researcher in Design at Aalto University exploring how design can generate dialogue, care, and collective reflection through material culture. Her practice combines ethnography, participatory design, storytelling, workshops, and exhibitions to investigate displacement, belonging, and the social lives of objects. Rather than treating design as the production of solutions, she approaches it as an ongoing cultural practice that creates spaces for people to think together, share difficult experiences, and produce knowledge collectively.

Kat Jungnickel is a Professor in Sociology and Director of Methods Lab at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her teaching and research explore the role of technologies and design in relation to invention, gender, citizenship and hands-on/DiY cultures of practice. Recent publications include: (ed) Wearable Utopias: Imagining, Inventing and Inhabiting New Worlds (with Fowles, May & Pugh, MIT Press 2024), (ed) How to Do Social Research With… (with Coleman & Puwar, Goldsmiths Press, 2024), (ed)Transmissions: critical tactics for making and communicating research (MIT Press 2020), Bikes & Bloomers: Victorian women inventors and their extra-ordinary cyclewear (Goldsmiths Press 2018).

Lucy Kimbell is Professor of Contemporary Design Practices at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London where she convenes the Policy Futures Studio. Her research explores service design, social design and design for policy. She taught design on the MBA at Said Business School, University of Oxford for 15 years, delivered executive education in design thinking and service design, and helped set up the MBA at Central Saint Martins. Lucy's artworks include Air Pollution Toile (2018), a concept for wallpaper that changes in response to air pollution, commissioned by and shown at Modern Art Oxford (2018), and Pindices (2005) commissioned by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel for Making Things Public, ZKM Karlsruhe. Other experiments in materialising data including The Lix Index for Channel 4/Arts Council’s identinet (2002), Audit published by Bookworks (2002) and group exhibitions Soda at Lux Gallery (1998) and Declining Democracy at Palazzo Strozzi (2011).

Harun Kaygan is Associate Professor of Design Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. His teaching and research interests lie in the social, cultural, political, economic contexts and impacts of design. Kaygan has background as an industrial designer and has published studies of design practices and designed things, employing new materialist and material semiotic theoretical frameworks. His most recent research examines how designers imagine and engage with users’ bodies today, with cases that span health and well-being, gender, mobility, play, and fashion. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book, Designing for Bodies: Imaginaries and Discourses.

Enya Moore is a researcher, educator, and creative practitioner whose work explores cultural ecosystems that support socially engaged creative practice. Based at the University of Sydney, she is currently exploring how mobile creative infrastructures foster relational, situated forms of knowledge sharing across translocal contexts. Her current project, FieldPress, developed with artist Kate O’Shea, architect Aideen O’Donovan, and printmaker Aoife Barrett, centres on a mobile printmaking device that acts as a relational tool for exploring these ideas. Enya is a Lecturer in Design and Programme Director of the Bachelor of Design (Interaction) at the University of Sydney. She is also a co-founder of Broken Fields, a transdisciplinary collective working across Ireland and Australia.

Ulises Navarro Aguiar is a researcher and lecturer at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg. His scholarly work explores questions around the relation of design to social and economic life, crossing disciplinary boundaries between design studies, organization studies and STS-infused economic sociology. Taking together these two lines of inquiry, his research operates on the dual registers of denaturalizing 'business as usual' in the field of design by critically analyzing the current order of things, and articulating alternatives for understanding and using design beyond modern fantasies of innovation. His research has been published in Valuation Studies, ephemera: theory and politics in organization, Journal of Cultural Economy, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Swedish Design Research Journal, and International Planning Studies. He has a background in industrial and strategic design and holds a doctoral degree in organization studies from the University of Gothenburg.

Emanuele Quinz is a curator and Full Professor at Université Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis, where he co-directs the Master's program in History and Criticism of Design. He is also an Associate Researcher at EnsadLab, the research laboratory of the École des Arts Décoratifs – PSL, and co-director of the DSAA Prospective at École Duperré Paris. His research explores the intersections of art, design, architecture and media, with a particular focus on experimental research formats and contemporary practices that challenge disciplinary boundaries. His publications include Strange Design (co-edited with Jehanne Dautrey, Les Presses du Réel, 2014), Contro l'oggetto. Conversazioni sul design (Quodlibet, 2020), recipient of the ADI Compasso d'Oro Award, Le comportement des choses (Les Presses du Réel, 2021), Ars naturans (Les Presses du Réel, 2026), and Behavioral Objects, Behavioral Matter: Rethinking Robotics Through Contemporary Art: An Atlas (co-edited with Samuel Bianchini, Spector Books, 2026).

Nathaly Pinto is a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University's Department of Design (Finland), working at the intersection of participatory research, activist practice, and collective knowledge-making through visual devices. She teaches design in Finland and Ecuador, and collaborates on three ongoing research projects: the MAST Network, exploring knowledge through making for sustainable transformations across indigenous and non-indigenous institutions in the Nordic region; Pictogramas de Nacionalidades Amazónicas, supporting indigenous visual knowledge-making and resistance processes in the Ecuadorian Amazon; and EDUCRI, examining the impacts of multiple crises on youth education and collective resilience across Ecuador, Finland, and Kenya.

Sini Rinne-Kanto is the Co-Founder and Head Curator of The Community, a collective-run, non-profit multidisciplinary art institution based in Paris. Founded in 2016, The Community exhibits and fosters critical discourse and work of artists and creatives in different forms – through exhibitions, events, concerts, performances, conferences, and talks – and across various disciplines, from art to fashion and music to publishing. In 2023, The Community presented a group exhibition AllTogether in New York, featuring the permanent art collection of Tom of Finland Foundation in dialogue with other artists’ work exploring the underground queer scene and nightlife in New York from the 1960s until today. The previous iterations of the show opened in Venice, Italy, in April 2022 on the occasion of the 59th Venice Biennial, and the second one in May 2022 in Paris, France. In 2019, Rinne-Kanto co-founded Salon de Normandy by The Community, a multidisciplinary art fair that brings together an international community of galleries, exhibition spaces, projects, fashion collectives, art publishers, and experimental music labels during the Parisian art week in October.

Delphine Rumo is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Design, Aalto University. She holds a BA in Industrial and Product Design (ECAL, 2009), a BA in Social Sciences (University of Lausanne, 2017), and an MA in Creative Sustainability (Aalto University, 2021). Her research focuses on the material, temporal, and more-than-human dimensions of construction economies, with particular attention to the movements of surplus soils and rocks.

Elise Simonsson, MA in Aesthetics, University of Helsinki, is a doctoral researcher at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, at the Department of Design. She is experienced within the fields of art, design and ceramics over the past twenty years, focusing on PR and communications, brand and content development, exhibition production and writing.Simonsson has worked with brands and companies such as Arabia, Iittala, Fiskars, and Stora Enso, along with independent artists, designers and creative groups. In her research Simonsson draws from her working experiences and combines the practice with research through a podcast production.

Emilia Tikka is a transdisciplinary design researcher and filmmaker. Her work is situated between technoscientific cultures and what are often described as Indigenous knowledge cultures, exploring design as an intercosmological practice. Her research, situated in the Arctic, intersects design, anthropology, and feminist and postcolonial STS to explore human relations with nature(s), science, and technology, with a particular focus on the politics of ontology, realities, and relational modes of existence. She is a postdoctoral researcher in the four-year POPULUS project, funded by the Research Council of Finland and affiliated with the Department of Social Sciences at Tampere University. Her monograph, Design in Between Worlds, presents research grounded in long-term collaborative artistic work in the nomadic reindeer worlds of Sápmi and engagements with bioscientists working in epigenetics. Her art and design works have been presented in a solo exhibition at Schering Stiftung in Berlin and in group exhibitions at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Ars Electronica, New York University Abu Dhabi Arts Center, Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Imagine Science Film Festival in NYC, and Tekniska Museet in Stockholm, among others.

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About the Artist

Dr. Ally Zlatar is a UK-based artist and researcher whose practice draws on auto-ethnographic and research-based methods to critically examine institutional language, professional identity, and the conditions under which authenticity and authority are produced. Their work has been exhibited and presented internationally and engages with questions of authorship, voice, and representation across artistic and academic contexts.

More information: https://allyz.cargo.site