Designing Your Research Agenda. Open forum (online) with Johanna Mehl, Nida Abdullah and Nate Matteson

Design scholars and researchers discuss various aspects of their research agendas

Friday, November 17, 2023 
12pm Eastern / 11am Central
Virtual Event

https://designincubation.com/design-events/designing-your-research-agenda-dyra-3-1/

Designing Your Research Agenda is a panel discussion and open forum for design scholars and researchers to discuss various aspects of their research agendas. We aim to open a dialog regarding multiple challenges of discovering one’s design research inquiry. Designing Your Research Agenda is an ongoing design research event series.

• Nida Abdullah (Pratt Institute)
• Nate Matteson  (DePaul University)
• Johanna Mehl (TU Dresden)

Some of the questions we will discuss with panelists include:

• How did you determine your research agenda (high-level timeline of your career/trajectory)
• How do you define research and why do you think it matters/for society, the field, and yourself?
• How do your department and institution define and support the work you do?
• How would you describe/categorize your department and institution?
• If you were going to position your work within a category, would you say your research addresses: design theory, design history, design practice, design research (traditional graphic design, speculative design, UXUI, typography, AR, VR, creative computing, design solutions, etc.), design pedagogy, or something else?
• What barriers (if any) exist at your institution or in the field for creating and disseminating your research?

MODERATORS

Jessica Barness 
Kent State University 

Heather Snyder Quinn
DePaul University

BIOGRAPHIES

Nida Abdullah is an Associate Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at the Pratt Institute. Her research explores softness- slowness as a practice of witnessing and witnessing as a pedagogical practice. Through visual, and social expressions, she interrogates design pedagogy and its long entanglement with capitalist colonial powers.  She is currently investigating the embodied making-practices of gota in the South Asian diaspora. She is part of the collective research group, Post-Radical Pedagogy.

Nathan Matteson is an Associate professor at DePaul University’s School of Design; a co-director of DePaul’s ‘Scandinavia: design, landscape, and society’ study abroad program; a researcher with the Center for robust decision-making in climate and energy policy at the University of Chicago; and a principal and designer at Obstructures. He is a ruthlessly collaborative designer whose work merrily ignores the perceived boundaries among disciplines, and is currently engaged with dead Swedish architects, guitars, the US energy sector, obstacles, and objects in the distance. His practice situates itself at an intersection amongst intersections, dead ends, superhighways, and goat paths, wringing its metaphorical hands over the relationships among computation, intention, materiality, and immateriality.

Johanna Mehl (she/her) is a designer, scholar, and educator interested in the politics and relations that take shape through and around design practices. She holds a B.A. in Communication Design and an M.A. in Art and Design Studies. Besides her artistic and curatorial practice, she has taught in the fields of digital media, culture studies, and design theory at different design schools across Europe. She is an editorial board member of the Design+Posthumanism Network and part of the research group Against Catastrophe. She holds research fellowship at TU Dresden where she is a  PhD candidate at the Chair for Digital Cultures. Her dissertation is about design responses to the climate crisis and stems from critiques of design that acknowledge its entanglements not only with the material realities, but also the geopolitical, psychological, and social conditions of climate change.