Editorial: Design for Tangible, Embedded and Networked Technologies

The third DRS conference tentSIG track builds on at least two of themes explored in 2018, and in many ways extends the theme of this year’s conference, Synergy, beyond any simple conceptualisations of collaborative or co-created design research. In particular the papers this year demonstrate further the continuing ‘geometric expansion’ of the design space, first discussed by Lee, Cooper and Hands in 2018, through worked examples of diverse aspects of the design experience, impacted in quite profound ways by a shift away from the human-centred, and towards a ‘flat’ ontology through distributed notions of users, processes, authorship, value creation, business models, and of course, products and services. Simultaneously, these papers do a sterling job of flying the flag for design research, and particularly for Research-through-Design (RtD), demonstrating and articulating its value to responsible research and innovation where it is needed most, in ensuring agency, negotiability and legibility in complex product-service and ‘intelligent’ systems. Between them, these researchers are mapping a new relational landscape of design, akin to Ingold’s world without objects.