Inmaterial Vol.6 N.°11 – 2021

Call for Papers
Design Research: Practices and Forms  

Debates surrounding and inquiring into the nature of Artistic and Design Research have been in progress since the early 90’s (Frayling, 1994; Cross, 2001; Pakes, 2004; Nollert, Rogoff, de Baere, Dziewior, Esche, Niemann, Roelstraete, 2006; Busch and Lesage, 2007) and still constitutive a live interesting area of concern. It is particularly important to frame these debates under the changes and transformations the university and academic institutions are facing. THese are giving place to new protocols and regulations globally (Borgdorff, 2012; Gonzalez, 2017; Seppä, Kaila, Slager, 2017; Vaughan Ed. 2017).  

Today the appearance and consolidation of MA and PhD programs in Arts and Design, giving place to practice-based research projects, have emerged as a new institutional space in which experimentation, reflection, critical practices and analysis are taking place simultaneously.  

"We are designers by nature" proposes the Nort-American philosopher Alva Noë in his book Strange Tools, Art and Human Nature. Noë proposes that art, research through artistic means, is situated and interwoven in and with our biological, organic roots. That is why we are always in a process of creative feedback, in an organizational encounter and dialogue, in constant world-making. World-making (Vergunst and Ingold, 2008; Angosto, 2013; Escobar, 2018; Bennett, 2020) involves this generative interweaving between practices and forms, methodologies and phenomena, doings and knowledges. However, research on design and art continues to constitute a contested academic field. The institutional paradigm of linear, arborescent, cataloguing research seems to constrain the ways of appearing in areas where practice shapes fragmented territories, in dialogue, in solidarity, collectively constituted.  

This new issue of Inmaterial. Diseño, Arte y Sociedad, wants to open up the territory to those contemporary forms and practices that are happening and developing within the frames of academic institutions, giving space and voice to the wider methodological, formal, and technical aspects involving design and art research.  

We welcome papers involving different outlooks coming from different disciplinary boundaries exposing their individual or collective researches, and critical engagement with a particular perspective within the frames of contemporary design research.   

Topics include, but are not limited to:   
- Art and design research methodologies   
- Practice-based research possibilities and limits    
- Experiments and concerns in art-design-science-society    
- New pedagogical and institutional arrangements for art and design research   
- Entanglements in practice and theory   
- How is design research situated in cross-disciplinary collaboration, navigating cultures, diversity or ethics?   
- What are the dynamics between design research, governments, academia and industry?   
- Experimental research and dialogues with materiality    
- Situated and embodied research practices between art and design 

Submission deadline: 30/04/2021
Send to: infoinmaterialdesign.com