Over the last few years we have been developing a number of student research conference in the school of design and 2017 is the first time we have combined all the programmes and researchers into one three-day event. The breadth of focus and research positions ranging from co-speculative design, design for repair, internet of things, new timeline visualisations, innovative materials and strategies for vehicle interiors to VR for safety and new banking service innovations allows new thinking and hybrid research positions to develop amongst the community of researchers. The increasing focus on how design is mediating the impact of humans on advanced technology and technology on human evolution is a central interest for many researchers. Out of this emerges the issues of human agency and qualitative expectations from quantitative networked digital experiences alongside the political, ethical and social changes that design research exposes and tackles through practice.

Extremely inverted commas was a phrase that stuck in my mind from Mike Kann’s presentation. He used it in an interesting way to acknowledge that he was using a caricature or stereotype description and to bear with us as he make his point. It struck me that we do a lot of this in research, using general terms, simplifications and caricatures to help us get from one point to another or to make bridges between ideas, theories and also disciplines. We also know that there are exceptions to this rule and shades of grey as we research deeper down to a granular level and that we have to park some of this detail to develop conversations on a higher level. It’s this navigating from detail to theoretical helicopter view and back again that makes the intellectual challenge of design research so engaging.