Campus

‘This project is something really dear to my heart’

Through DCODE, Professor Elisa Giaccardi hopes to tackle the complex design challenges of a digital transformation of society in a holistic way.

Elisa Giaccardi : “We’re getting a lot of enthusiastic reactions, people say they’ve been waiting for a programme like this for a really long time.” (Photo: Hans Stakelbeek)

“We have just launched a new project called DCODE. It’s a European research network and PhD programme funded by Horizon 2020 MSCA Innovative Training Network. It’s something really dear to my heart. I have been working on the idea and the framework underpinning the project for about two years. I really wanted this focus and this team, so I’ve been waiting for everyone’s personal circumstances to be right. In the end, we brought home a stellar score at the first submission and we’re launching now, hiring for 15 PhD positions across five European countries.


The motivation behind this ambitious project is that the landscape of design has changed significantly for industrial design, but we’re still conceptually and methodologically a bit stuck in the past. Many of the issues that we are facing today when it comes to the design of digital products and services are the result of a lack of new foundations for design, a new type of design competence. So we’re really going to tackle this need for new foundations of design, so that we can design digital products and services that are powered by big data, machine learning or artificial intelligence in ways that are more inclusive and responsible.


It’s really about understanding the interdependencies between many levels of intervention, from the algorithmic level, to the interactions, to the way in which value is co-created online, to the governance of the data and algorithms. It’s a very holistic approach, which makes it a very ambitious project, but we’re already getting a lot of enthusiastic reactions, both from colleagues around the world and students that say they’ve been waiting for a programme like this for a really long time.


‘We call it a post-disciplinary mode of working’


We have seven universities in five countries, plus Philips Design, hiring PhD students. And we have an additional six non-academic partners which provide an ecology of collaborations in both the public and private sector for our case studies. The signature of the project is this idea of ‘prototeams’. We are going to bring together PhD students that have different disciplinary backgrounds to work on concrete cases in real world settings. And in doing so we want them to develop the knowledge that’s needed to deal with this new level of complexity, while at the same time rehearsing and prototyping the new design roles and practices that need to be in place for working on these challenges effectively. Not just what you need to know as a designer, what new skills you need, but also what kind of design team or practice you need to have in place in order to be effective when dealing with such challenges.


We’re taking what we call a post-disciplinary mode of working, meaning that we really want to arrange research activities around specific challenges rather than disciplinary divisions. This idea of challenge-based research is very core to the project. It boils down to a different way of understanding the boundaries between the disciplines and crossing them. Our ambition is to launch something that could grow into something bigger once the project is over, but first of course we need results.”


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Heather Montague / Freelance writer

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