Together with a group of great people, the social design unit is deeply involved in arranging and hosting the NORDES 2021 conference, which is held August 15-18 as a joint event at Design School Kolding and University of Southern Denmark. Matters of Scale – the theme of the conference – is a timely and relevant issue for design research which is not least witnessed by the unusually high number of contributions submitted to this year’s conference. At the conference website you can find 32 full papers, 23 exploratory papers and 6 workshops addressing the theme and published in the Proceedings.

In addition, the exhibition Agency in the City of Kolding has been curated by Kathrina Dankl and Eva Knutz as an artistic scaling experiment in how the conference format itself can be challenged by breaking out of the institutional settings. In the form of eight urban interventions made by artists and designers from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Portugal and Spain, the NORDES 2021 conference manifests itself at eight sites that can be experienced both online and physically in the city of Kolding.

Videos documenting the eight urban interventions can also be found at the conference website.

Conference link can be found here.