Ilpo Koskinen visiting Design Studio FEUP next October

Dr. Ilpo Koskinen, formerly the head of the Industrial Design department at Aalto University School of Art and Design UIAH (commonly known commonly as TaiK) (Helsinki, Finland), is visiting FEUP and the Design Studio FEUP through October 2010 to discuss a possible partnership between Aalto and the new Product Design Development MSc and PhD programs. Professor Ilpo kindly accepted the invitation made by Carlos Aguiar, last July at TuDelf and will be arriving at Porto October 16th. for one month working on his new book and researching on Design.

Ilpo Koskinen is currently on leave from his position at TaiK to write a book called Lab, Field, Showroom: How to Research Through Design, and will be published by Morgan Kaufmann, September. 2011. “The idea is to look at the most successful ways to do design research in which people actually design something. Lab refers to work that builds on experimental methodology, while Field builds on interpretive social science, and Showroom on design and even art. The book looks at where these three methodologies come from, how they work, and what is common to all of them,” said Koskinen.

Koskinen is working on the book with co-authors who are also involved in design research, including School of Design and HCII faculty member from Carnegie Mellon John Zimmerman, Thomas Binder from the Danish Design School, Johan Redström from the Interactive Institute in Sweden, and Stephan Wensveen from Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e). “We hope to clarify the sometimes fuzzy notion of research through design, which has become popular in over the last few years.”

 “I think this is important work to do right now, especially since Design schools are increasingly doing research.”

We hope a work meeting for this book development will also be held at Porto, in November, allowing FEUP to host the authors and establishing links to some of the major Design Schools in the world.

Koskinen has written several books already, including the English titles: Mobile Multimedia in Action (2007), Professional Mobile Image (2002), Empathetic Design (2003), and Industrial Design as a Culturally Reflexive Activity in Manufacturing (2001), available as a PDF. He is also the editor for the 2007 conference Proceedings on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces. (Several other titles are available on Google Books.

Aalto University School of Art and Design is the largest art university in the Nordic countries and has a total of about 2,000 graduate and undergraduate students enrolled.