View inaugural lecture by Eva Brandt

The online and onsite lecture was recorded on Zoom and you can enjoy the recording right HERE.

For more than 25 years, Eva Brandt has engaged in designing products, changing work practices and work spaces, researching everyday life and future living, and developing healthcare and welfare solutions and services. She has co-designed with private and public institutions, patient organisations, NGO’s, and people who will be affected by the design. The objective is to develop design methodologies that expand the mind- and formgiving skill set of designers. The collaborative techniques elicit matters of concern related to everyday living, evoke past experiences, and give form to new preferable futures.

In Eva Brandt’s inaugural lecture, she shares stories, theories and practices from her research and teaching. Her research is based on real-life experimentation and centres on developing designers' formgiving practices, particularly focusing on democratic design experiments. For example, how designers can stage open-ended collaborative design (co-design) processes that bring together people with different matters of concern.

Some main points made by Eva Brandt in her lecture:

• My ambition is to nurture the creativity and collaborative attitude of everyone interested in achieving change.
• In collaborative design processes everyone should have something at stake.
• I would like all design students to do a design project that really matters for some people.
• At a design school I think we must contribute to developing design practices and expand what designers can work with as professionals.
• Designers need co-design frameworks, tools and techniques that encourage everyone to take part in exploring possible futures.
• Design games are powerful as each player has the possibility to make game moves and hereby influence the 'future vision' or whatever is at stake.
• In Design Labs innovation can be accomplished when being open for unpredictable learning.
• Rehearsing the future in Living Labs paves the way to successful change in practice.
• Co-design is about improving quality of life by opening up pathways rather than specifying end-points.

About
Eva Brandt is professor and head of Lab for Social Design at Design School Kolding (2019 -). For more than 10 years Eva Brandt was co-leading the Centre for Research in Codesign (CODE) at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design. Drawing together theory and practice-based design research, her aim is threefold:

1) To contribute to the fields of experimental design research and co-design, 

2) To expand the mindset and formgiving methodology of designers, and 

3) To educate design students as empathic, critical and reflective practitioners with the capability of making design proposals for change within many different fields.

Eva Brandt has contributed to how designers can organise open ended collaborative processes. She has published on how to explore the past, the present and possible futures in tangible ways through for instance design games, generative prototyping and rehearsing the future. Her research has always been on active involvement of various stakeholders in the design process. Eva Brandt has contributed to several books such as: Design Spaces (IT press, 2005), Rehearsing the Future (Danish Design School Press, 2010), Facilitating Change (Polyteknisk, 2011), SeniorInteraction – innovation gennem dialog (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, 2012), Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design (2013), Dansk Design Nu (Strandberg Publishing, 2016), Practice Based Design Research (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Ledelse og Samskabelse i den Offentlige Sektor (Dansk Psykologisk Forlag, 2018), The Routledge Companion to Games in Architecture and Urban Planning (2019). Eva Brandt chaired the international Nordic Design Research Conference (NORDES) in 2013 and 2021.