Educational Organization: The CoDesign Research Cluster

The Codesign Research Cluster is an educational research center focusing on new knowledge in the area of design. The Cluster is part of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. 

The Codesign Research Cluster defines designing as a social process, and means that there is a powerful potential for thinking in new directions and create innovations by involving ’potential users’ and other stakeholders actively in the design process.

The overall objective is both to produce new knowledge about how design work is conduced in practice, and to contribute to a continuous improvement of the field through developing and exploring different approaches, methods and tools for co-designing where the knowledge of the participants are brought into play and various activities simultaneously support mutual learning processes for all involved.

Activities

Central is various experimental oriented research approaches that both investigate existing practice and explore new possibilities by for instance staging processes where the participants ‘rehearse the future’. The activities of the CoDesign Research Cluster are e.g.:

• Courses
• Seminars
• Research
• Publications
• Students projects

New knowledge is produced through interplay between people and artifacts in specific contexts. The Codesign cluster integrates knowledge from research domains like participatory design, design anthropology, science and technology studies, performance studies and interaction design.

Collaboration

Often the research projects are carried out in collaboration with public institutions, private companies and design consultancies and/or other educational institutions. For instance some of the partners have been:

Vestforbrænding I/S, Copenhagen Municipality, Arkitema, 1508, 3PART, Mindlab, Workz, Designit, Johnson & Johnson, CIID, IT-University Copenhagen, The Danish Technical University, og Copenhagen University.