First Call for Contributions
NORDES 2025 - RELATIONAL DESIGN
11th Nordic Design Research Society (NORDES) Conference
We are pleased to invite contributions to the NORDES 2025 Conference on the theme RELATIONAL DESIGN
Dates: 6-9 August 2025
Venue: OsloMet University, Oslo, Norway
NORDES 2025 symbolises a collective arrival for our design research community at the completion of the first quarter of the 21st century. The conference offers a range of shared spaces and formats for reconsidering what we intended and may have achieved so far in design inquiry. Please consider joining in this celebration and opportunity to further shape the community!
This event also invites us to reconsider designing and related practices, pedagogies and research as we look towards the mid-21st century. We do so in the contexts of pervasive, difficult and emergent challenges, compound crises, and deepening complexities and uncertainties about how to achieve and secure substantive and durative transformation in a world undergoing rapid ecological and systemic demands and changes.
NORDES 2025 takes up the open theme Relational Design to offer perspectives and means through which we may together investigate and discuss complex dilemmas and current responses, along with design’s futures and futures designing.
Below please find the First Call for Contributions to a range of types that we hope will encourage your participation.
A Second Call will follow in a month that will contain details of submission types and links to templates and further practical information.
Looking forward to your contributions.
Please do feel free to circulate this call to your design research colleagues and doctoral students, institution, linked organisations and design research networks.
With best regards,
Conference co-chairs
Prof Alma Leora Culén (University of Oslo), Prof Laurence Habib (OsloMet) & Prof Andrew Morrison (AHO)
P.S. For your convenience, find a complete call bellow, as well as a PDF to share with those you think might be interested in receiving the call.
First Call for Contributions
NORDES 2025 - RELATIONAL DESIGN
Contributions are now most welcome for NORDES 2025
The 11th Nordic Design Research Society (NORDES) Conference
www.nordes.org<http://www.nordes.org>
Wednesday 6 August – Saturday 9 August 2025
Located at OsloMet University, Oslo, Norway
ORIENTATION
NORDES 2025 marks the 11th bi-annual conference in this series. Launched in 2005, the Nordic Design Research Conferences have been shaped and sustained through commitment and participation from a range of Nordic design research institutions, together with regional and international participants.
NORDES 2025 symbolises a collective arrival for this community at the completion of the first quarter of the 21st century. The event offers a range of shared spaces and formats for reconsidering what we intended and may have achieved so far in design inquiry.
However, at this juncture, this occasion also invites us to reconsider designing and related practices, pedagogies and research as we look towards the mid-21st century. We do so in the contexts of pervasive, difficult and emergent challenges, compound crises, and deepening complexities and uncertainties about how to achieve and secure substantive and durative transformation in a world undergoing rapid ecological and systemic demands and changes.
THEME
NORDES 2025 takes up the open theme Relational Design to offer perspectives and means through which we may together investigate and discuss complex dilemmas and current responses, along with design’s futures and futures designing.
Relational Design gives attention to ontological multiplicity in evolving processes of becoming and emergence. It accentuates working with possibilities, tensions, paradoxes and contraditictions in re-framing and shaping resonances, alliances, linkages and networks of making and researching.
Working within and across difference, Relational Design instantiates interrelations, intersections and distinctions. It facilitates non-normative, situated knowledge experimentation and its generative practices. Relational designing treasures linked, participative and dynamic agency to bring forward pragmatically viable, equitable and bearable transformative potentials and their resonant effects.
Designing and researching relationally asks us to consider the shaping of re-directive design as well as analytical and methodological frames and practices linked with values, ethics, concepts and methods centred on repair, regeneration and reinvigoration.
This includes how agency be realised when embedded within alliances, networks and webs of relationships to cultivate incipient ventures and bolder analyses in articulating relational design activities and pluralist design research formations.
Overall, rethinking and re-making design relationally invites engagement in working with entanglements - of places, zones,values, processes and participation - that are enmeshed in living and regenerative situations, environments, systems and situated acts of worldmaking.
The following are open prompts for consideration:
How might we re-think and re-work design researching in a way that remains rich and responsible in its situated, exploratory and critical practices while charting pathways and networks, alliances and diversity which contribute to wider structural, systemic and ecological transformation towards sustainable tomorrows?
What are the pragmatic, political and creative-critical characteristics of a linked, re-positioned design inquiry that reaches beyond the logics of immediate market gain and commercial extractivist expolitation and their continuing ecological destruction?
How might we elicit diverse potentials and possibilities for realising plural, mutual, malleable and participative change in which human and nonhuman entities and ecologies are interwoven and interspersed, reflexively, recursively and regeneratively?
What design tools and techniques might be applied to work with temporal and spatial intersections and relations that support shaping creative, multimodal and transductive design literacies in order to steward practices, ethics and cultures of care and environmental justice for near and farflung regenerative futures?
In what ways might we rethink and decolonise roles and relations, activities and responses in shaping counter-narratives and collaborative storying in design inquiries that are infused with context-rich alternatives, plural perspectives and multiple mediational formats?
What non-essentialist, transdisciplinary design-thick intersectional critiques of circular thinking and economic models might inform socially, technically and ecologically responsible and vibrant sustainable change?
SUBMISSION FORMATS
NORDES conferences accept full submissions not only abstracts. A range of well-rehearsed submission formats provides both formal analytical frames yet allows for designerly articulations suited to shaping and querying relational designing practices and their research approaches and modes of publication.
NORDES 2025 invites the following contributions by type:
* Full papers
* Exploratory papers
* Workshops
* Exhibition
* Doctoral Consortium
All submissions are subject to a pre-review process carried out by the conference chairs and submission category coordinators to ensure coherence and quality. Full and exploratory papers, workshop and exhibition proposals will be subject to double-anonymous peer reviews. One set of full reviews per submission is provided with notifications and guidelines for preparing revised manuscripts for final digital publication. Templates for all submission types will be provided the NORDES 2025 website and also on www.nordes.org<http://www.nordes.org>
KEY DATES & REGISTRATION
Important dates for contributions
Call for contributions: I November 2024
Submissions open: 15 January 2025
Deadline Full and Exploratory papers: 14 February 2025
Deadline Workshops, Exhibitions & Doctoral Consortium: 28 February 2025
Notification to contributors: 31 March 2025
Final revised submissions: 25 April 2025
Final acceptances: 9 May 2025
NOTE: Registration is needed by presenters by 31 May to be included in the programme, archive and proceedings.
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Conference fee & registration
Fees includes the opening event, daily refreshments, lunches and the conference dinner.
Registration opens: 10 April 2025
Early Bird:
Students, including PhD students, with valid student ID (before 22 May 2025): 250 €
Regular participants: (before 22 May 2025): 450 €
Standard:
Student (closes 12 June 2025): 300 €
Regular (closes 12 June 2025): 500 €
Late & onsite registration (one fee for full or partial attendance):
Student (with valid student ID): 400 €
Regular: 600 €
PROGRAMME & PUBLICATION
Programme
Final programme published: 20 June 2025
Programme outline:
Wednesday 6 August 2025: Welcome, Keynote, Refreshments and Snacks
Thursday 7 & Friday 8 August 2025: Keynotes, Conference presentations and events
Saturday 9 August 2025: Doctoral Consortium
Publication
All accepted submissions will be available as open access publications during and after the conference via the NORDES Digital Archive. Subsequently, publications will be accessible via the online DRS Digital Library and in the format of an integrated Conference Proceedings.
ABOUT NORDES 2025
Location
In 2025 NORDES returns to Oslo. The conference is located at the OsloMet city centre campus. On this occasion, we have three closely connected conference chairs from three leading design research institutions and a lively local organising committee and a team of Nordic organisers and regional and international reviewers.
Conference co-chairs
University of Oslo (Prof Alma Leora Culén), OsloMet (Prof Laurence Habib) and AHO (Prof Andrew Morrison)
Organisers, reviewers, theme and session chairs, assistants, communication design and sponsors will be posted online at a later date.
Previous conferences
Papers from and material about earlier NORDES conferences can be found at www.nordes.org<http://www.nordes.org>
and also archived in the DRS digital library https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/nordes/
Dear colleagues,
We invite you to these exciting two online activities at NordiCHI this year.:
* The Nordic Sprawl: An online role-play session
* The Unconference
See below for more information on how to sign up.
We hope to see you there!
All the best,
Claudia Núñez-Pacheco (On behalf of the NordiCHI team)
Read our latest paper: “Articulating Felt Senses for More-than-Human Design: A Viewpoint for Noticing” (Honourable mention at DIS2024) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661554
Find me: https://linktr.ee/cnunezpacheco
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Seats are still left for the online role-play session: The Nordic Sprawl! Sign-up now!
Game master: Kevin Dalli
CONTEXT OF THE GAME:
The cold air of the perpetual northern winter slices through the neon lights of the city districts in the Nordic sprawl. In a future defined by its country sized cities, towering skyscrapers and expansive ruins. The Sprawl is a cyberpunk tabletop RPG where the icy landscapes, littered with remnants of the old world, contrast with glowing cities controlled by omnipotent mega- corporations like Live Corp. You are amongst a team of specialists operating on the fringes of society. This session will be set in the frozen ruins of what was once Umeå. The haunting remnants of Umeå holds secrets for you to discover that could shift the balance of power and are bound to be a stepping stone to achieving your characters goals.
MAKE UP YOUR ADVENTURE TOGETHER!
You and your team get to choose your place in this high-tech world. Who are you? What is your mission? What makes up the details of this world and how do you fit into it? Perhaps you work for Live Corp, navigating corporate espionage. Maybe you are an academic striving to find answers amidst the chaos. Or perhaps you are rogue outlaws exploiting the cybernetic landscape for your own gains. From bustling overcrowded city districts to desolate wasteland districts, together with the other players, you will decide the adventure and get the chance to immerse yourself in a future where cybernetic enhancements and digital consciousness uploads are common, exploring the ethical implications of advancements in HCI.
SIGN UP!
Sign-up for one of these two sessions and help shape the future of this neon and chrome-drenched world of tomorrow.https://doodle.com/sign-up-sheet/participate/e9e6effb-b037- 4ae6-8e43-774f6e255745/select
Session one
Monday October 14th: 19:00-22:00 / Prep session: Sunday October 13th : 13:00-13:30
Session two
Tuesday October 15th: 19:00-22:00 / Prep session: Sunday October 13th, 14:00 – 14:30
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UNCONFERENCE
Join our online Unconference session on Monday 19-22! You can suggest topics for the session here:
https://forms.office.com/r/YmqSVH3Af8
