Dates: 15-18 August 2021
Location: Design School Kolding and University of Southern Denmark - Kolding.
Website: NORDES 2021
Deadline for submissions: 20 January 2021
Matters of scale
Scale is ubiquitous in the world of design, but its implications mostly go unnoticed. Terms that are easy to use, like the global or human-scale, have widespread allure and even impact, yet they also hide and confuse. Although scale is a fundamental feature of all systems, artefacts and organisms, it is surprisingly rarely reflected upon in design. In the abstract, scale points to mathematical features but it is, above all, inherently relational and comparative. To think about scale nearly always involves thinking about another context of activity or reception that is either inside, outside or beyond the immediate field of practice. Design research may be pivotal in how matters of scale are understood and acted on.
In these times of urgent troubles, problems appear to be large-scale and designers are often invited to 'scale up' their efforts to solve them, or defend the wellbeing or the rights of a universal 'human'. Meanwhile viruses, for instance, wreak havoc in machines and bodies across different orders of scale, connecting and disconnecting in complicated ways. If size, temporal duration, scope, territory and impact work in scalar ways in design, whether noticed or not, how can we learn to take scale seriously?
Nordes 2021 provides opportunities to explore the multiple roles, processes and impacts of scales across all areas of design and design research in all their manifestations. How does scale matter in the context of design, designs and designers? What kinds of scalar relationships does design involve and how does or might design research identify and problematise these?
Full papers, exploratory papers, exhibition artifacts and workshops that, in design research, explicitly address the topic of 'Matters of Scale' are invited.
- The matters of scale Potential conference themes may include, but are not limited to:
- Audit, measurement and ranking
- Manufacture, modularity and making
- Human-, non-human and other scales and calibrations
- Queer scales
- Communities, publics, diasporas, networks
- Governance, design for policy and implementation
- Downscaling, relocalising, resilience, resistance
- Territories, borders, shrinkage, dead spaces
- Economies of scale
- Temporal regimes: routines and irregularities; sprints and hacks
- Open, big and small data
- Prototypes, toolkits, archetypes, blueprints, guidelines, models
- Platforms and one-offs
- Representations, reproductions, fakes
Submission categories
Submissions to all categories receive peer review.
Full and exploratory papers are subject to a double-blind, peer review process, and accepted full and exploratory papers will be published in the online Nordes Digital Archive.
Submission categories:
- Full papers
- Exploratory short papers
- Exhibition artifacts
- Workshops
- Doctoral Consortium
Key dates
20 Jan 2021 Deadline for submissions
1 April 2021 Notification to authors and contributors
3 May 2021 Final submission deadline
15-18 Aug 2021 Conference
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