Research areas

I am Professor of Design Studies – quite literally, professor in an academic field where we are studying design, because design as a core phenomenon of our time intersecting culture, society, business and economics calls for unbound academic research, with a contemporary as well as historical perspective.

My research has been guided by three leading concepts, all underpinned by book publications: 1) Design Aesthetics, because aesthetics is vital to understanding the effects of design but only to a little degree has been explored; 2) Design Culture, because concepts are needed to comprehend in multi-facetted complexity of design in the span of production, designing, mediation, and consumption; and 3) Design Imagination as a phenomenological theory of design as imagining-becoming-into-being.

Currently, I am working with design for water. Under the heading “Liquid Forms”, I am collaborating with the Norwegian design historian Malin Graesse to investigate how design operates as an interface for experiencing water in everything from drinking glasses and commodified, bottled water to larger infrastructures in cityscapes with designed means of accessing water, such as fountains and water posts.