Abstract
How can we hold, practice, communicate complex relationality in design research, education and practice; as individuals, in teams, and between different communities of knowledge? We explore the role that a particular visual metadesign framework has played in negotiating such relationality over a period of 20 years. Drawing upon cases of organisational change, design of education and research leadership, we address complex sustainability contexts, including gender and intersectionality. The paper examines how the iterative development of the framework has evolved in dialogue with the specific needs of each project as well as with an ongoing discourse of the needs presented by global challenges. At a metalevel, the exploration shows how the framework has supported us to understand, find agency in and communicate the emerging field of metadesign - with a risk of also limiting our scope. The paper therefore makes a contribution to insights on the interdependent movement of expanding understandings of design and sustainability, and, more generally, the role of relational design tools in world re/un/making.
Keywords
Relational tools, Relationality, Metadesign, Complex Systems, Languaging, Sustainability
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2025.54
Citation
Jones, H., Lundebye, A.,and Tham, M.(2025) A companion map for relational metadesign journeys, in Brandt, E., Markussen, T., Berglund, E., Julier, G., Linde, P. (eds.), Nordes 2025: Relational Design, 6-8 August, Oslo, Norway. https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2025.54
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Exploratory Papers
Included in
A companion map for relational metadesign journeys
How can we hold, practice, communicate complex relationality in design research, education and practice; as individuals, in teams, and between different communities of knowledge? We explore the role that a particular visual metadesign framework has played in negotiating such relationality over a period of 20 years. Drawing upon cases of organisational change, design of education and research leadership, we address complex sustainability contexts, including gender and intersectionality. The paper examines how the iterative development of the framework has evolved in dialogue with the specific needs of each project as well as with an ongoing discourse of the needs presented by global challenges. At a metalevel, the exploration shows how the framework has supported us to understand, find agency in and communicate the emerging field of metadesign - with a risk of also limiting our scope. The paper therefore makes a contribution to insights on the interdependent movement of expanding understandings of design and sustainability, and, more generally, the role of relational design tools in world re/un/making.