Abstract
Imagine it is a rainy winter day, and you are walking up to a little mustard yellow house on wheels and step up three wooden steps to enter. You notice the pulsing light of candles and the warmth of the fireplace that is heating the indoors. Some people are sitting around the table dreaming of how they would use the house if they could borrow it for a while. You take a step inside to join and have some tea. While stepping in you hear the splash of a puddle and feel your socks soak up water before you even get your foot back on the doorstep. What just happened? We built the Tiny House on Wheels to explore relations to resources and today's challenges through a series of seasonal experimentations. These interventions enable physical experiences as a starting point to become aware and engage in discussion about the underlying themes of householding with resources in a holistic way. In this exploratory article we look back at two full cycles of experiments and do so by reflecting on the seasons they were situated in. As a result, we suggest designers to challenge themselves to work with relationships between temporality, place and forces such as seasons into constantly emerging designs. Furthermore, we suggest seasonal designing as a practical and conceptual response to contemporary grand and complex eco-social challenges and life-long learning.
Keywords
seasonal design, householding, resources, interventions, tiny house on wheels
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2025.55
Citation
Keune, S.,and Ståhl, Å.(2025) Seasonal design, 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.2025.55
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Exploratory Papers
Included in
Seasonal design
Imagine it is a rainy winter day, and you are walking up to a little mustard yellow house on wheels and step up three wooden steps to enter. You notice the pulsing light of candles and the warmth of the fireplace that is heating the indoors. Some people are sitting around the table dreaming of how they would use the house if they could borrow it for a while. You take a step inside to join and have some tea. While stepping in you hear the splash of a puddle and feel your socks soak up water before you even get your foot back on the doorstep. What just happened? We built the Tiny House on Wheels to explore relations to resources and today's challenges through a series of seasonal experimentations. These interventions enable physical experiences as a starting point to become aware and engage in discussion about the underlying themes of householding with resources in a holistic way. In this exploratory article we look back at two full cycles of experiments and do so by reflecting on the seasons they were situated in. As a result, we suggest designers to challenge themselves to work with relationships between temporality, place and forces such as seasons into constantly emerging designs. Furthermore, we suggest seasonal designing as a practical and conceptual response to contemporary grand and complex eco-social challenges and life-long learning.