Conference Report: EKSIG 2023

The aim of the conference was to investigate the role of prototypes and their relationship with the multifaceted landscape of today’s design research. As prototypes and prototyping represent ideas and give intelligible form to abstract concepts regarding design solutions, they support the interconnections and collaborations among researchers and practitioners in several design fields. Their role encompasses possibilities that link to the context and aim of design research whose scope of inquiry has recently expanded to tackle various technological, social, and environmental issues (e.g. the impact of technology on society, climate change, social innovation, etc.). With more challenging issues and the current landscape of design research, prototypes have become more complex and embodied the translation of different design languages into a developing concept. EKSIG 2023 was therefore meant to be a platform for design researchers to share and discuss ways in which they have utilised and/or might utilise prototypes and prototyping in their research to generate and evaluate new and existing knowledge.

The conference received a great response with an unusually high number of full paper submissions from researchers all over the world. The papers were largely interdisciplinary and came from researchers situated in various design fields, including, but not limited to, architecture, automotive design, craft, design engineering, design for health and wellbeing, design education, material design, interaction design, service design, social design, and textile design. The 55 accepted papers were organized into 12 tracks for presentation across the two conference days:
- Track 1 Interaction, Data and AI / 1
- Track 2 Service design and Policymaking
- Track 3 Research processes and methods / 1
- Track 4 Sustainable and Biological solutions
- Track 5 Materials and Crafts
- Track 6 Society and Health
- Track 7 Materials and Digital
- Track 8 Education processes and methods
- Track 9 Research processes and methods / 2
- Track 10 Mobility and Transportation
- Track 11 Interaction, Data and AI / 2
- Track 12 Fiction & Speculative design

The post-conference publication will be published as a special issue of Journal of Design Research (JDR) in 2024

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Suggested Citation: Nimkulrat, N. (2023, August 21). Conference Report: EKSIG 2023, Politecnico di Milano, 19-20 June 2023. Design Research Society. https://www.designresearchsociety.org/articles/conference-report-eksig-2023