Matters of Scale

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Matters of Scale

Proceedings of the 9th Nordic Design Research Conference, Kolding, Denmark

15-18 August 2021

Edited by: Eva Brandt, Thomas Markussen, Eeva

Berglund, Guy Julier and Per Linde

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Nordes 2021 Conference

Proceedings of Nordes International Conference

15-18 August 2021, held online.

Editors Organized by

Conference Visual Identity

Conference Proceedings Design

ISSN

https://conference2021nordes.org/

Cite

Eva Brandt, Thomas Markussen, Eeva Berglund, Guy Julier, and Per Linde

Design School Kolding

University of Southern Denmark

Stinna Hougaard Vinther Sørensen, Design School Kolding

Syuan-Yun Huang, Design School Kolding

1604-9705

Brandt, E.; Markussen, T., Berglund, E.; Julier, G.; and Linde, P. (eds.) (2021). Proceedings of Nordes 2021:

Matters of Scale. 15-18 August 2021, Kolding, Denmark.

All content remains the property of authors, editors and institute.

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Matters

of Scale

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Content

Content

About Nordes

Welcome to Nordes 2021:

Matters of Scale

Original Call for Submissions About Design School Kolding About SDU

Program Overview Detailed Program Keynotes

Full Paper and

Exploratory Paper Sessions Plenary Session:

Rethinking Scale

6

8 18 20

38 16

32 12

38

14

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Exhibition:

Agency in the City of Kolding Workshops

Conference Credits Reviewers

Sponsors and Partners Paper Session 1

Paper Session 2

Paper Session 3

Paper Session 4

Paper Session 5

Paper Session 6

Manageable Scales

Rankings and Other Values Scaling Exhibitions

Resistances

Futures (1)

Non-human and Other Scales (Un)sustainability (1)

Futures (2) Bodily Scales

(Un)sustainability (2)

Shifting Scales Working Scales

Organisational Re-Scaling

Policy Worlds Weavings Proximities

Intimate Scales Learning Scales Urban Scales 48

114 170 402

317 238

48

114 170 402

317 238 58

135 197 418

348 269 79

152 217 444

377 291 95

462

472

496

498

500

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About Nordes

NORDES – Nordic Design Research – was established in 2005 when design researchers from the Nordic countries decided to organize the first Nordic Design Research Conference which welcomed all kinds of design research as opposed to more narrowly defined research conferences. In addition to organising the biannual Nordes Conferences and Summer Schools, Nordes promotes the publication and dissemination of design research through the open access Nordes Digital Archive (nordes.org).

The ambition of Nordes is to be a vital inspirational platform that gathers scholars interested in design research no matter if one come from for instance the so- called artistic institutions, from universities, polytechnical universities, business schools or is an independent scholar. Over the years, Nordes has attracted still more contributions and participants from the rest of the world. Today, it is acknowledged as an international conference of the highest academic standards.

Nordes Commons is an open network of people interested in design research and participating in the Nordes Conferences, the Nordes Summer Schools or other Nordes activities. As part of the Nordes Commons network people will receive information about Nordes events and other issues of relevance for design and design research.

All people taking part in the Nordes events will be offered to be part of the Nordes Commons network. Everyone in the Nordes Commons network will be called for a meeting to appoint the Nordes Board during the Nordes Conference.

The Nordes Board is responsible for all activities between conferences, for example Nordes Summer Schools. The Nordes board consists of the previous and present conference’s General and Programme Chairs, as well as representatives from the Nordic countries not otherwise covered by those functions. The chair(s) of the board is the General Chair(s) for the next conference. The board meets when needed, at least twice a year.

The General Chair(s) for next conference should be complemented by at least two Programme Chairs representing at least two countries.

The Programme Chairs are proposed by the Conference Chair(s) and appointed by the board.

Currently (2019 – 2021) the Nordes Board consists of:

• Tuuli Mattelmäki (Aalto University, FI)

• Mette Agger Eriksen (KAD, DK)

• Satu Miettinen (University of Lapland, FI)

• Andrew Morrison, (AHO, NO)

• Henry Mainsah, (OsloMet, NO)

• Eeva Berglund, (Aalto University, FI)

• Per Linde, (Malmö University, SE)

• Guy Julier, (Aalto University, FI)

• Thomas Markussen, (SDU, DK)

• Eva Brandt (Design School Kolding, DK)

About Nordes

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Previous Nordes Conferences

Who Cares?

8th Nordic Design Research Conference

3-6 June 2019, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland Design + Power

7th Nordic Design Research Conference 2017 15-17 June 2017, AHO, Oslo, Norway

Design Ecologies

6th Nordic Design Research Conference 2015 June 7-10, 2015, Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden

Experiments in Design Research

5th Nordic Design Research Conference 2013 June 9-12, 2013, KADK, Copenhagen, Denmark

& Malmoe University, Sweden Making Design Matter

4th Nordic Design Research Conference 2011 May 29-31, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland Engaging Artifacts

3rd Nordic Design Research Conference 2009 August 30-September 1, AHO, Oslo, Norway Design Inquiries

2nd Nordic Design Research Conference 2007 May 27-30, Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden In the Making

1st Nordic Design Research Conference 2005 May 29-31, Royal Danish Academy, School of Architecture, Copenhagen, Denmark

Nordes Programme Committee is recruited by the board to review research papers and other contributions. The requirement for being part of the Programme Committee is to have a Ph.D.-degree. At the pre-conference, Nordes Programme Committee Meeting, it is decided which contributions to accept or reject based on peer-review. Research papers are always subject to a double-blind, peer review process.

Besides the Programme Committee takes part in developing the conference programme with sessions etc. at the Programme Committee Meeting.

The Nordes Summer School will normally be organised the year between the biannual conferences and in another country than the next conference. The board appoints the people responsible for organising the next summer school.

Nordes Publications are promoted through the

Nordes Digital Archive (Nordes.org) that gives

open access to design research presented at

Nordes events and other design research such

as doctoral dissertations. Nordes may also

initiate and promote other forms of publication

of design research. Responsibility for Nordes

publications and particularly for the Nordes

digital Archive are held by the board and those

they appoint.

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Welcome to Nordes 2021:

Matters of Scale

This volume is the proceedings of the 9th biennial Nordes conference, hosted by Design School Kolding and the University of Southern Denmark, 15 – 18 August 2021. All contributions relate in different ways to the overall theme,

‘Matters of Scale’.

Designers are often invited to upscale their efforts to help solve the big challenges facing our societies and the planet. But just as often, the idea of upscaling is met with a critical requirement to evaluate, document and account for design-initiated change. Otherwise, the idea easily ends up representing “the overblown claims”, as Geoff Mulgan once called them, that unfortunately stick to design.

Welcome to Nordes 2021: Matters of Scale

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Scale offers itself as a constructive lens for scrutinizing these histories and narratives of design, helping to trace multiple critiques from postmodernism’s satire and anti-design to today’s ongoing feminist and post-colonial design discourse and practices. Scale may provide new explanatory power for understanding how design and sustainable future-making are practiced in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. This is a world where the forces that condition design – markets, economies, politics, migration, pandemics – change and articulate in unexpected ways, not least due to processes of neoliberalization, globalization, and the normalization of digital technologies. And with the advent of Big Data and AI, life is now surveilled, exploited, and proactively speculated upon at unprecedented scales

It has become evident over the decades that upscaling is not always the key and will not lead to the solutions needed to address the challenges proliferating in our troubled times. On the contrary, the urge to upscale itself arises out of the very beliefs and ideologies that are largely responsible for the distress that we – and our descendants – will have to deal with. Since the dawn of modern design, ideas of scaling have doubtless led to socially beneficial innovations and human well- being. But upscaling also leads to disastrous environmental as well as social outcomes. The utopian imaginaries of the modern movements that emerged in inter-war period were indeed duly critiqued. It became clear that the notion of ‘modern design’ itself needed to be de-scaled or trans-scaled to refrain from being too commercially driven, too megalomaniac, too discriminating - too much!

“Scale is ubiquitous in the world of design, but its implications mostly go unnoticed”

Nordes 2021, Original Call for Submissions.

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These and many other central questions are addressed in the four keynote talks, doctoral consortium, paper presentations, workshops and exhibitions that can be experienced at Nordes 2021. As to the number of submissions, we are grateful for all those designers/

design researchers and artists who proposed submissions and all those participating in the conference. Among the conference paper categories, there was an unusually high amount of full and exploratory papers submitted this year. Based upon double-blind peer reviews, of the 86 submitted there were 32 full papers accepted and 23 exploratory papers accepted of the of the submitted 73 proposals.

As scale is a feature of all systems, artefacts and organisms, understanding scales may provide designers and design researchers with significant insights in how to practice design for change. This raises a range of questions, such as how can design research be used to explore the interconnected aspects of scales and make them visible?

What kinds of scalar relationships does design involve and how does – or might – design research identify, study and problematize these?

What research methods and conceptual frameworks exist - or need to be developed - for enquiring into the multiple implications of scales in the world of design?

Scale is also important for grasping how the notion of agency is,

today, radically transformed from a question about the freedom to

act in given structures, to a question of how we as a species can co-

exist and survive with other species or artificial, hybrid organisms and

plants. The Copernican revolution of our anthropocene epoch consist

precisely in the discovery that climate change is the result of stacking

ecologies with serious damages emanating from the human scale. In

this situation, how can design be of value in efforts to to fundamentally

change the way we live, work, produce, think, eat, dress, consume,

communicate, and transport ourselves?

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Nordes was established in 2005 by design researchers from Scandinavian design schools and universities. One can tell by the countries represented today by authors, workshop organizers, designers and artists that Nordes has truly become a venue for dissemination, attracting broad international attention. We are proud to present this year’s high-quality conference programme and excited to see how participation will be conducted through the online format.

These proceedings largely follow the organization of the conference program. This means that full papers and exploratory papers are grouped within a number of sub-themes. Please have a look at the detailed program in order to get an overview of the papers. After the papers, there follow presentations of the eight works for the exhibition. A separate Nordes 2021 exhibition catalogue can be found at (https://conference2021nordes.org/).

On the website you can also find videos from the exhibition. The proceedings conclude with the workshop descriptions. https://conference2021nordes.org/

Organizing the conference would not have been possible without the immense work, expertise and support invested by the scientific organizing committee, conference producers, session chairs, review committee, digital and media chairs, student/alumni volunteers, Design School Kolding, the University of Southern Denmark and the conference sponsors. Thank you to everyone!

We hope you will enjoy the conference and the proceedings!

As design practice and processes are understood at Nordes to be invaluable and legitimate methods of inquiry, we have allocated a full conference day for 5 workshops, selected from 21 workshop proposals that were submitted.

In addition, the exhibition Agency in the City of Kolding has been curated 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. Furthermore, how scaling is at stake in some of the interventions will be a topic of discussion in the new initiative called ‘Exhibition Conversations’. Last, but not least, four panelists will prompt debate with the delegates about new sites of design enquiry.

Eva Brandt, Thomas Markussen, Eeva Berglund, Guy Julier and Per Linde Conference and Program Chairs for Nordes 2021

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Original Call for

Submissions:

Matters of Scale

Scale is ubiquitous in the world of design, but its implications mostly go unnoticed. Terms that are easy to use, like the global or human-scale, have widespread allure and even impact, yet they also hide and confuse.

Although scale is a fundamental feature of all systems, artefacts and organisms, it is surprisingly rarely reflected upon in design. In the abstract, scale points to mathematical features but it is, above all, inherently relational and comparative. To think about scale nearly always involves thinking about another context of activity or reception that is either inside, outside or beyond the immediate field of practice. Design research may be pivotal in how matters of scale are understood and acted on.

In these times of urgent troubles, problems appear to be large-scale and designers are often invited to ‘scale up’ their efforts to solve them, or defend the wellbeing or the rights of a universal ‘human’. Meanwhile viruses, for instance, wreak havoc in machines and bodies across different orders of scale, connecting and disconnecting in complicated ways. If size, temporal duration, scope, territory and impact work in scalar ways in design, whether noticed or not, how can we learn to take scale seriously?

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NORDES 2021 provides opportunities to explore the multiple roles, processes and impacts of scales across all areas of design and design research in all their manifestations. How does scale matter in the context of design, designs and designers? What kinds of scalar relationships does design involve and how does or might design research identify and problematise these? Full papers, exploratory papers, exhibition artifacts and workshops that, in design research, explicitly address the topic of ‘Matters of Scale’ are invited.

The Nordes 2021 conference invites original papers and submissions addressing matters of scale in various ways. Papers will undergo double blind peer-reviews and accepted papers will be presented in the conference programme and published in the conference proceedings. The proceedings will be available as an open access online database during and after the conference.

Submissions to all categories receive peer review. We do not accept abstracts so in order to be considered full submissions need to be made within each category and uploaded before January 27nd 2021. Full and exploratory papers are subject to a double-blind, peer review process, and accepted full and exploratory papers will be published in the online Nordes Digital Archive (Nordes.org).

Potential conference themes may include, but are not limited to:

• Audit, measurement and ranking

• Manufacture, modularity and making

• Human-, non-human and other scales and calibrations

• Queer scales

• Communities, publics, diasporas, networks

• Governance, design for policy and implementation

• Downscaling, relocalising, resilience, resistance

• Territories, borders, shrinkage, dead spaces

• Economies of scale

• Temporal regimes: routines and irregularities; sprints and hacks

• Open, big and small data

• Prototypes, toolkits, archetypes, blueprints, guidelines, models

• Platforms and one-offs

• Representations, reproductions, fakes

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Nordes 2021 Conference About Design School Kolding

About

Design School Kolding

Design School Kolding is an independent institution under the auspices of the Ministry of Higher Education and Science in Denmark. We teach about 350 students and offer BA, MA and PhD Degree Programs with education based on innovative practice and research in close collaboration with the business community and with public and private institutions. We also offer postgraduate courses and consultancy services. Our BA program comprises four study programs, Industrial Design, Communication Design, Fashion &

Textile Design, and Accessory Design, including interdisciplinary courses

within design methods, aesthetics, design history, the history of science as

well as form studies.

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Design School Kolding has approximately 100 fulltime employees. The school offers a dynamic work environment with dedicated colleagues from many different backgrounds. The atmosphere enriches daily work and brings life to the old factory building in which the School is housed and which is constantly changing to suit the School’s needs. With the three overall strategic areas of Social Design, Sustainability and Design, and Design for Play, Design School Kolding is dedicated to improving the world through design. This also means that Design School Kolding has a strong focus on creating an education that is relevant and aimed towards future employability. Another way of strengthening the education is by having research aimed towards the four directions of the BA programs, as well as towards the strategic areas. The research thus supports and develops the teaching while ensuring cross-pollination. We offer a dynamic, internationally oriented education and research environment with close collaborations with external actors and research environments.

Our MA program is an international, cross-disciplinary program that

supports and expands the above-mentioned design fields and allows

students to specialize in one of three areas: Design for Play, Design for

Planet and Design for People to which we also dedicate our research and

development activities within the three laboratories. We are a locally based

learning environment that works internationally. By attracting talent and

close partners from around the world, we provide our students with skills

and contacts to engage effectively in a global labour market.

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About SDU

The University of Southern Denmark (SDU) is a state- financed, self-governing institution operating within the public administration under the supervision of the Ministry for Higher Education and Science. SDU have five faculties with more than 27,000 students, almost 20% of whom are from abroad, and more than 3,800 employees distributed across our main campus in Odense and regional campuses in Kolding, Slagelse, Esbjerg and Sønderborg. Several international studies document that we conduct world-class research and are one of the top fifty young universities in the world.

SDU Kolding is one of SDU's five regional campuses and with its location in the heart of Kolding, close to the train station, Kolding's other educational institutions and the local entrepreneurial environment, it is centrally located in the so-called Triangle Region in Jutland.

We are housed in a distinctive triangular building, which, with its characteristic appearance and its well- designed interior creates attention and constitutes an invitation for collaboration with internal as well as external parties. The building houses over 2,000 students and approximately 200 employees.

About SDU

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SDU Kolding provides the setting for research activities within the social sciences and the humanities, with entrepreneurship, design, relationship management, IT and communication as keywords. Research activities are often cross- disciplinary and involve a variety of collaborators.

Municipalities, companies, and cultural and educational institutions throughout the region are a part of the activities, and the latest addition is the innovation environment Pakhuset at the Port of Kolding. As part of the Science Parks of Southern Denmark, Pakhuset brings together educational institutions, entrepreneurs, and companies in Kolding to create new solutions to the challenges of the future.

The research lays the foundation for innovative

and socially relevant educational programmes that

develop the individual student to take part in an

ever-developing knowledge society. Several of the

programmes at SDU Kolding are interdisciplinary

and there is a focus on extraordinary talents

such as for example the international Master’s

degree programme, European Master in Tourism

Management.

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Program Overview

2021 AUG

15 16

Sun.

Mon.

DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM CONFERENCE OPENING PLENARY SESSION Rethinking Scale

KEYNOTE: JAMER HUNT

The Powers of Eleven: How Shifts in Scale are Remaking the Possible

WELCOME

KEYNOTE: LENE TANGGAARD Creativity – a Matter of Scale?

PARALLEL PAPER SESSION 1

Manageable Scales | Rankings and Other Values Scaling Exhibitions | Resistances

PARALLEL PAPER SESSION 2

Futures (1) | Non-human and Other Scales | (Un)sustainability (1) PARALLEL PAPER SESSION 3

Futures (2) | Bodily Scales | (Un)sustainability (2) PARALLEL PAPER SESSION 4

Shifting Scales | Working Scales | Organisational Re-Scaling EXHIBITION TOURS

Program Overview

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2021 AUG

17 18

Tue.

Wed.

WORKSHOPS

EXHIBITION CONVERSATIONS PANEL DISCUSSION

Off-Topic - New Sites for Design Enquiry KEYNOTE: CELIA LURY

How do we count ourselves? The New Political Arithmetic of Personalisation

PARALLEL PAPER SESSION 5

Policy Worlds | Weavings | Proximities PARALLEL PAPER SESSION 6

Intimate Scales | Learning Scales | Urban Scales KEYNOTE: MIKAEL COLVILLE-ANDERSEN The Life-Sized City

CLOSING REMARKS

NORDES COMMONS MEETING

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15 - 18 August 2021

Detailed Program

Detailed

Program

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Program

August 15

^th

2021

Sunday

Day 1

12:00

16:00

18:30 19:00

20:00 09:00

13:00

17:00

17:30 08:15

PLENARY SESSION: RETHINKING SCALE

Session chair: Andrew Morrison

Rethinking Scale – Relationality, Place, and Critical ZoneOle B. Jensen (F)

KEYNOTE: JAMER HUNT

The Powers of Eleven: How Shifts in Scale are Remaking the Possible

Introduction by Eva Brandt LUNCH

BREAK

CONFERENCE OPENING

Eva Brandt and Thomas Markussen

DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM

DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM Online technical support

END OF DAY 1 (F) = FULL PAPER

(E) = EXPLORATORY PAPER

mainroom mainroom mainroom mainroom

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Program

August 16

^th

2021

Monday

Day 2

10:00

11:15 09:00

10:15

08:15

Online technical support

Manageable Scales

Session Chair:

Louise Ravnløkke

Rankings and other Values

Session Chair:

Andrea Botero

Scaling Exhibitions

Session Chair:

Andrea Wilkinson

Resistances

Session Chair:

Liesbeth Huybrechts

Teaching Size, Area and Scale Ingri Strand and Eva Lutnæs (E)

On Wearing Diaries and Scaling Practices:

Exploring Wardrobe Studies in Fashion Education

Julia Valle Noronha (E)

Envisioning Large-Scale Effects of Teaching Values in Design

Anne Linda Kok, Eva Eriksson and Elisabet M.

Nilsson (F)

Scaling up Diversity and Inclusion: From Classroom to Municipality

Annukka Svanda, Martina Čaić and Tuuli Mattelmäki (F)

Object/Display/Architecture: Integrating Scales in Museum Exhibition Design Ane Pilegaard (F)

From “Bugs” to Exploratory Exhibition Design – Transforming Design Flaws in Users Experiences

Kristina Maria Madsen and Peter Vistisen (E) Value, Design, Scale: Towards a Territories and Temporalities Approach

Guy Julier and Elise Hodson (F)

Counter-Framing Design: Politics of the 'New Normal'

Sharon Prendeville and Pandora Syperek (F) BREAK

zoomroom

BREAK

WELCOME

Eva Brandt and Thomas Markussen

KEYNOTE: LENE TANGGAARD

Creativity – a Matter of Scale?

Introduction by Helle Marie Skovbjerg

PARALLEL PAPER SESSION 1 A

B

C

D

(F) = FULL PAPER

mainroom mainroom

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13:15 11:45

Futures (1)

Session Chair:

Josina Vink

Non-human and Other Scales

Session Chair:

Thomas Binder

(Un) sustainability (1)

Session Chair:

Maria Göransdotter

Troubling the Impact of Food Future Imaginaries

Danielle Wilde, Markéta Dolejšová, Sjef van Gaalen, Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Hilary Davis and Paul Graham Raven (F)

The Design Fiction Matrix— A Synthesis Tool for Grounding Fiction Scenarios in Real Facts

Peter Vistisen (E)

Temporal Scales of Participation: a Rift Between Actors and Spectators

Alicia Smedberg (E)

'Design for Noticing' with Biodiversity Logbooks

Liz Edwards, Serena Pollastri, Linda Pye and Robert Barratt (E) A Tale of a Wise City: A Speculation on Entanglements of Non-Humans and Humans in an Urban Space

Inna Zrajaeva (E)

Cocoon – Conceptualisation of a Virtual Membrane in the Current Transition Towards More-Than-Human Design Cornelia Hulling, Jan von Loeper, Swathi Shivaraj, Yanyi Lu (E) Multiple Lives of the Products: An Investigation of Products’ Journey in Freecycle Community

Ayşegül Özçelik and Ayşe Kaplan (F) (Un)Weaving (Un)Sustainability

Sheida Amiri-Rigi and Despina Christoforidou (F) zoomroom

zoomroom

LUNCH

CONTINUED

PARALLEL PAPER SESSION 2 A

B

C

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Program

August 16

^th

2021

Monday

Day 2

15:30 14:00

Futures (2)

Session Chair:

Pandora Syperek

Bodily Scales

Session Chair:

Per Linde

(Un) sustainability (2)

Session Chair:

Anna Seravalli

Amphibious Scales and Anticipatory Design Andrew Morrison, Bastien Kerspern, Palak Dudani and Amanada Steggell (F)

Revealing Words for a Design Debate: A Design Lexicon Case

Yaprak Hamarat, Catherine Elsen and Çiğdem Yönder (E)

Transitional Design Histories: Present-ing History in Design

Maria Göransdotter (F)

Where did the Body Go? Re-Framing Human Scale

Andrea Victoria Hernandez Bueno, Cecilie Breinholm Christensen and Shelley Smith (F) Breathing Commons: Affective and Somatic Relations Between Self and Others

Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Stina Hasse Jørgensen, Lena Kühn, Karin Ryding, Mai Hartmann, Jonas Fritsch and Maria Foverskov (E)

Scaling Bodily Fluids for Utopian Fabulations

Karey Helms, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard and Nadia Campo Woytuk (E)

Exploring Implications for Designing for Sociotechnical Transitions: Taking Reflexivity as s Matter of Scale Peng Lu and Daniela Sangiorgi (F) Rethinking Food: Co-Creating Citizen Science for Sustainability Transitions Danielle Wilde, Anna Lena Hupe, Sarah Trahan, Caroline Guinita Abel, Solvejg Kjærsgaard Longueval and Corey McLaughlin (F) BREAK

PARALLEL PAPER SESSION 3

zoomroom

A

B

C

(F) = FULL PAPER

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17:30 16:00

Shifting Scales

Session Chair:

Tuuli Mattelmäki

Working Scales

Session Chair:

Namkyu Chun

Organisational Re-Scaling

Session Chair:

Canan Akoglu

Challenges of Downscaling and Upscaling in Human Centered Design

Simon Nestler, Sven Quadflieg and Klaus Neuburg (F)

Big Data and Small Beginnings – How People Engage with Data Physicalizations

Jacob Buur, Jessica Sorenson and Christina Melanie Cooper (F) A Matter of Scales: Experiential Evaluation as a Caring Platform Scales

Lieve Custers, Oswald Devisch, and Liesbeth Huybrechts (F) Distributed Thinking Through Making: Towards a Relational Ontology in Practice-Led Design Research

Luis Vega (F)

Tangled Becomings in Materialities of Felt Practice(s) Bilge Merve Aktaş and Julia Valle Noronha (E)

The Extension of the Craftsman’s Hand by Robotics Flemming Tvede Hansen (E)

Attempting to Resist Ontological Occupation when Designing for Scale in Healthcare

Josina Vink, Felicia Nilsson, Thiago Freitas and Shivani Prakash (F) Developing a Design-Based Understanding of Learning in Transitions: A Multiple Case Study

Elif Erdoğan Öztekin and İdil Gaziulusoy (F) Capturing Scales of Institutioning Harriet Simms (E)

DINNER BREAK

PARALLEL PAPER SESSION 4

CONTINUED zoomroom

zoomroom

A

B

C

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Program

August 16

^th

2021

Monday

Day 2

19:00

| 21:30

19:00

| 20:30

1. One Square Meter

Site: Kolding Å By Ekaterina Feil

1. One Square Meter

Site: Kolding Å By Ekaterina Feil

2. I Am You

Site: Grafitti Tunnel By Leah Ireland

2. I Am You

Site: Grafitti Tunnel By Leah Ireland

3. Motion of Scales

Site: Narrow Path By Mara Trübenback and Marianna Czwojdrak

3. Motion of Scales

Site: Narrow Path By Mara Trübenback and Marianna Czwojdrak

4. Scale the Change

Site: The Spanish Stairs By Maria Candela Suarez

4. Scale the Change

Site: The Spanish Stairs By Maria Candela Suarez

5. Material as Playmates

Site: The Public Library By Karen Juhl Petersen

5. Material as Playmates

Site: The Public Library By Karen Juhl Petersen

6. Rewild

Site: The Station Square By Aymeric Delecaut

6. Rewild

Site: The Station Square By Aymeric Delecaut

7. mAcrobiome

Site: The Railway Tunnel By Alison Marinas Palomino

7. mAcrobiome

Site: The Railway Tunnel By Alison Marinas Palomino

8. Forgotten Spaces

Site: Kolding Habour By Katharine Morag Graham

8. Forgotten Spaces

Site: Kolding Habour By Katharine Morag Graham

PHYSICAL EXHIBITION TOUR

Tour Guide: Eva Knutz

ONLINE EXHIBITION TOUR

Tour Guide: Kathrina Dankl Detailed Program

END OF DAY 2 END OF DAY 2

SITE 4: The Spanish Stairs SITE 5: The Public Library

mainroom

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SITE 5: The Public Library SITE 6: The Station Square SITE 7: The Railway Tunnel SITE 8: Kolding Habour

Site 1: One square metre Nearby the canal and the Design School

Site 2: I Am You

Nearby the parking lot and graffiti tunnel

Site 3: Motion of Scales Narrow path next to restaurant Rafeal's

Site 4: Scale the Change

Nearby the Spanish stairs Site 5: Material as Playmate Outside the public library

Site 6: Rewild

At the station square Site 7: mAcrobiome At the station tunnel

Site 8: Forgotten Spaces At Kolding Harbor

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Nordes 2021 Conference Detailed Program

12:00 13:00

09:00 09:00

10:30|

12 Principles of Social Design

Jocelyn Bailey, Lucy Kimbell, Patrycia Kaszynska and Christian Nold

HALF DAY

Desis Philosophy Talk #7.3 Designing down to Earth:

Introducing Re-worlding

Virginia Tassinari, Liesbeth Huybrechts, Ezio Manzini, Oswald Devisch and Annalinda De RosaHALF DAY

Stories for Collaborative Survival

Nicholas B Torretta, Lizette Reitsma, Brendon Clark, Per Anders Hillgren and Li Jönsson

FULL DAY

Designing Scales of Domestic Mending in Fashion

Louise Ravnløkke and Iryna Kucher HALF DAY

Stories for Collaborative Survival

Nicholas B Torretta, Lizette Reitsma, Brendon Clark, Per Anders Hillgren and Li Jönsson

FULL DAY

Residue of Interaction: Scaling Participatory Experiences

Andrea Wilkinson, Lieke Lenaerts,

Niels Hendriks and Rita Maldonade Branco FULL DAY

Residue of Interaction: Scaling Participatory Experiences

Andrea Wilkinson, Lieke Lenaerts, Niels Hendriks and Rita Maldonade Branco FULL DAY

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Program

August 17

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Tuesday

Day 3

EXHIBITION CONVERSATIONS Scaling Art & Design in Public Space

Session Chair: Connie Svabo mainroom

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16:00

17:30 16:30

17:45

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PANEL DISCUSSION:

Off-Topic - New Sites for Design Enquiry

Session Chair: Thomas Markussen

Panellists: Natalia Särmäkari, Vicky Gerrard, Anna Valtonen, Ingrid Mulder

KEYNOTE: CELIA LURY

How do we count ourselves? The New Political Arithmetic of Personalisation

Introduction by Guy Julier END OF DAY 3

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Nordes 2021 Conference Detailed Program

Program

August 18

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2021

Wednesday

Day 4

10:30 09:00

Policy Worlds

Session Chair:

Lucy Kimbell

Weavings

Session Chair:

Karen Marie Hasling

Proximities

Session Chair:

Brendon Clark

Co-Citizen Design Labs in Resilience Making Stephanie Carleklev and Wendy Fountain (F) Beyond a Living Lab: Scaling Social Innovation Signe Yndigegn, Lone Malmborg, Maria Foverskov and Eva Brandt (F)

In search of (Organizational) Learning and Translation in Public Innovation Labs

Anna Seravalli (F)

Fibre, Fabric, and Form: Embedding Transformative Three-Dimensionality in Weaving

Kathryn Walters (F)

Between Yarns and Electrons: A Method for Designing Textural Expressions in Electromagnetic Smart Textiles Erin Lewis (F)

Prototyping Scales of Knitwear Design for Sustainability Louise Ravnløkke (F)

Critical Proximities Henrik Oxvig (F)

Living World Dynamics - Or what Brian Eno can Teach us About Knowing in a Complex World

Connie Svabo (F)

Tracing Matters of Scale by Walking with Minerals Petra Lilja (F)

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PARALLEL PAPER SESSION 5

(F) = FULL PAPER

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12:30

15:00 11:00

Intimate Scales

Session Chair:

Yaprak Hamarat

Learning Scales

Session Chair:

Eeva Berglund

Urban Scales

Session Chair:

Jacob Buur

On DIY Cloth Face Masks and Scalar Relationships in Design Joanna Saad-Sulonen, Andrea Botero and Mille Rosendahl Hansen (E)

Places in the Making: How Fashion Design Transforms the Multitude of Scales

Namkyu Chun (E)

Thinking With/In the Wardrobe Anna-Mamusu Sesay (E)

Micro-Scale Curriculum Development in Design for Sustainability Education

Karen Marie Hasling and Louise Ravnløkke (E)

Re-Thinking Pedagogy and Dis-Embodied Interaction for Online Learning and Co-Design

Salu Ylirisku, Giyong Jang and Nitin Sawhney (F)

Appropriating a DBR Model for a ‘Research Through

Codesign’ Project on Play in Schools - to Frame Participation Hanne Hede Jørgensen, Helle Marie Skovbjerg and Mette Agger Eriksen (F)

Scaling Up and Down. Landscape Design Processes and Choreographic Inquiry

Enrica Dall'Ara and Melanie Kloetzel (E)

Scaling Experiments in Urban Space – An Exploratory Framework

Eva Knutz and Kathrina Dankl (E)

Closer to Earth: Scales of Planning for Urban Waters Kristine C.V. Holten-Andersen (E)

LUNCH

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PARALLEL PAPER SESSION 6

14:30 13:30

15:30

| 16:30

CLOSING REMARKS

KEYNOTE: MIKAEL COLVILLE-ANDERSEN The Life-Sized City

Introduction by Eeva Berglund

NORDES COMMONS MEETING

Nordes conference 2023

Nordes Summer School 2022 (PhD school)

Feedback & Learnings END OF CONFERENCE

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Nordes 2021 Conference Keynotes

Keynotes

Jamer Hunt

Lene Tanggaard Celia Lury

Mikael Conville-Andersen

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Jamer Hunt

Vice Provost for Transdisciplinary Initiatives Associate Professor of Transdisciplinary Design University

The New School, Parsons

The Powers of Eleven:

How Shifts in Scale are Remaking the Possible

We often think of scale in two straightforward ways: as a means for comparing the relative size of things, or as a process for increasing the market share of a business product. In this presentation, Jamer Hunt suggests that we must begin to understand scale as a conceptual framework for thinking through the present. Digital dematerialization and network entanglements are deforming our perception and conception of scale and unsettling our capacity to link cause and effect — or design with its outcomes.

Cutting across disciplines and ranging across topics (from ants to traffic circles and from surveillance systems to COVID-19), this presentation will x-ray our current social predicaments and outline design strategies for navigating the complexity of our many

“broken” systems.

Biography

Jamer Hunt collaboratively designs open and adaptable frameworks for participation that respond to emergent cultural conditions

— in education, organizations, exhibitions, and for the public. He is the Vice Provost for Transdisciplinary Initiatives at The New School (2016-present), where he was founding director of the graduate program in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design (2009- 2015). He is also Visiting Design Researcher at the Institute of Design in Umeå, Sweden.

He is the author of Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible (2020), a book that repositions scale as a practice-based framework for navigating social change in complex systems.

Fast Company has named him to their list of

“Most Creative People.” With Paola Antonelli

at the MoMA he was co-creator of the award-

winning, curatorial experiment and book

Design and Violence (2013-15). They have also

collaborated on the Design and the Elastic

Mind symposium as well as on HeadSpace: On

Scent as Design, and he served on her Advisory

Committee for the XXII Milan Design Triennial

Broken Nature. With Hilary Jay he co-founded

DesignPhiladelphia in 2005, at that time the

country’s largest design week. He has published

over twenty articles on the poetics and politics

of design, including for Fast Company and

the Huffington Post, and he is co-author, with

Meredith Davis, of Visual Communication

Design (Bloomsbury, 2017).

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Lene Tanggaard

Rector at Design School Kolding

Professor of Psychology in the Department of Communication and Psychology at the University of Aalborg, Denmark

Creativity – a Matter of Scale?

In this presentation, the point of departure will be the recent moves in creativity research towards more relational, distributed and cultural-historical, systems-oriented perspectives on creativity. This implies that researchers increasing try to research creativity in real-life settings outside the laboratory or the testing situation, even if the lab or the test are still the norm instruments researching creativity. However, cultural- historical, relational and distributed theories make the way for larger, more encompassing and broader ideas of what creativity is.

Accordingly, moving outside the laboratory requires creativity researchers to think more about scales; going from the small and controllable lab or testing situation towards reaching the complexity of creativity in the midst of everyday life. This means going from researching situations (in the lab, in the testing situations or in the survey) towards understanding the process of creativity or of being creative as it moves along trajectories of participation in social practices in material and temporal terms not downsized to one point in time measured by one instrument.

Although the concept of scale has not been in the center of research on creativity from cultural-historical, relational and distributed perspectives, it might pave the way for new, innovative, methodological experiments.

What this might mean for understanding and researching design and not least the process of being creative as a designer will be discussed.

Biography

Lene Tanggaard is Rector at Design School Kolding and Professor of Psychology in the Department of Communication and Psychology at the University of Aalborg, Denmark where she has been supervisor for more than 20 PhD.- students as well as Director of The International Centre for the Cultural Psychology of Creativity (ICCPC), and co-director of the Center for Qualitative Studies, a network of more than 90 professors and researchers concerned with methodology and development of new research tools. She is regional editor of The International Journal of Qualitative Research in Education. Recent publications include:

Glaveanu, V. P., Tanggaard, L. & Wegener, C. (2016 red.), Creativity: A new vocabulary Palgrave Macmillan, Tanggaard, L. (2018).

Creativity in Higher education: Apprenticeship as a ’thinking-model’ for bringing back more dynamic, teaching and research in a university context. In: J. Valsiner (red.). Culture and Higher Education: The making of knowledge maker. (1. edition, Vol. 1.) and Tanggaard, L.

(2018). Content-driven pedagogy: on passion, absorption and immersion as dynamic drivers of creativity. In: R. Beghetto & G. Gorazza (red.).

Dynamic Perspectives on Creativity: New Directions for Theory, Research, and Practice in Education. (1. edition, Vol. 1).

Keynotes

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Celia Lury

Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at Warwick University

How do we count ourselves?

The New Political Arithmetic of Personalisation

Scholarship on the history of statistics has provided us with an understanding of the crucial role of ‘political arithmetic’ in classical liberalism, where subjects perceived themselves as autonomous individuals with separate interests in an abstract system called society. This society and its component individuals became intelligible and governable through what has been described as a deluge of printed numbers.

Probabilities enabled commensuration and comparison of distributions in a way that made society as a whole intelligible and governable. The proposal developed in a collaborative project, People Like You:

Contemporary Figures of Personalisation (peoplelikeyou.ac.uk) is that the categories, numbers and norms of this ‘statistical’

political arithmetic have changed in a ubiquitous culture of personalisation. In this paper, I develop this claim by exploring the kinds of scaling that are at work in the emergence of ‘personalised generics’ such as #MeToo and MyUniversity, focusing on their relational, comparative and perspectival possibilities.

Biography

Celia Lury is Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at Warwick University. She is currently working on a collaborative medical humanities project:

“’People Like You’: contemporary figures of personalization”. A new publication is Problem Spaces: Why and How Methodology Matters, Polity 2020.

Deriving from her interest in the way ‘live’

methods represent social worlds, she works on interdisciplinary methodologies, feminist and cultural theory, sociology of culture, consumer culture, and algorithms.

Celia Lury is co-editor of Routledge

Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research

Methods (Routledge, 2018), Inventive

Methods: the Happening of the Social,

(Routledge, 2012), and Measure and Value

(Blackwell, 2012), among other volumes.

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Mikael Colville- Andersen

Urban designer

Author and host of the documentary TV series The Life-Sized City

The Life-Sized City

Through his work as an urban designer in over 100 cities around the world and his experiences filming his global TV series about urbanism, The Life-Sized City, Mikael Colville-Andersen will speak about how in this, the Age of Urbanism, we are thinking differently about our cities for the first time in a century. We need to return to designing our cities for people instead of merely engineering streets. Citizen engagement is a key element in our shift towards life-sized cities. Mikael will inspire with his philosophies as well as fantastic ideas he has seen in his work all over the planet.

Biography

Mikael Colville-Andersen is one of the leading global voices in urbanism. He has worked in over 100 cities around the world, advising about how to design – and embrace – bicycle and pedestrian friendly streets in order to improve urban life. He is known for his pioneering philosophies about simplifying urban planning and how cities and towns should be designed instead of engineered. Mikael Colville-Andersen is the author of Copenhagenize – the definitive guide to global bicycle urbanism and the host of the urbanism tv series. He motivates with his keynotes around the world about how to make cities better through design thinking, how cities should be at the forefront of fighting climate change and how this Age of Urbanism is inspiring citizens around the world.

Keynotes

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Plenary Session:

Rethinking Scale

Rethinking Scale-Relationality, Place, and Critical Zone

Ole B. Jensen

Session Chair | Andrew Morrison

Plenary Session

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RETHINKING SCALE –

RELATIONALITY, PLACE, AND CRITICAL ZONE

OLE B. JENSEN

AALBORG UNIVERSITY OBJE@CREATE.AAU.DK

ABSTRACT

Scale is an important concept. It works in geography, architecture, urbanism and a number of other areas. It also works in the ‘real world’ of humans where it organizes societies and fuel politics. Scale gather people in collectives, as well as it works a political force for pitting them against one another. Hence scale is far from neutral. In this paper, we want to critically challenge an understanding of scale as something fixed, structural, obdurate, and ordered. Rather we encourage a thinking of scale as something related to fluidity, mobility, networks, and continuums. Rethinking scale along these lines is important for the academic understanding of the world, as well as it is key to many of the global and planetary challenges of the immediate future. This will be discussed with reference to the notion of ‘Critical Zone’ at the end of the paper.

INTRODUCTION

A perception of scale as fixed, ordered, layered, human, and sedentary is problematic in a context global

challenges and environmental multi-species crisis. Ideas about scale as either something ‘out there’ or simply an act of the imaginary are equally unhelpful. Some design practitioners and architectural theorists frame scale as fixed, bounded, and professionally identity-giving (from more than 20 years of co-teaching in an academic architecture and design program, this author has heard many statements from architectural lecturers seeing themselves as ‘building architects’ defined by the

‘building scale’). Here scale is ontologized as an ordered, hierarchy fitting with a particular layer of reality. The notion that scales are existing as ‘layers of

reality’ is problematic in the sense that such fundamentalization of scale tends to ignore the relational processes of becoming. Furthermore, the notion of scale a ‘layers of reality’ obscures the fact that entities in the world are related across domains such as subjects and objects, humans and non-humans. Ideas about holism and continuity blurs the parceling of reality into distinct (scalar) layers. Within architecture and urbanism some scales are furthermore vested with normative judgement. Such is the ‘human scale’ which often is pitched as the ‘good’ scale and perspective up and against top-down plans and ‘inhumane’ urbanist schemes. Seeing the world from the point of view of the

‘human scale’ is thus considered to be normatively on the side of humanism and progressive politics. In this paper we shall not dispute the relevance of taking the perspective of the human, neither of the citizen – on the contrary. However, what is problematic is an

unquestioned and uncritical understanding of normativity and scale. Somewhere between the materialism of scales being ‘out there’ and the idealism of seeing such as purely mental constructs needs to be located a rethinking of scalar ontologies. The same goes for seeing a particular human scale as the best place to intervene (at times we might indeed need to move beyond the human to make sense of the world). Scales are often seen as ordering devices. As a framing bringing order and hierarchy to an unruly world. From nation building and politics of territoriality to business organization the order produced by scale is key in a stratifying taxonomy.

In this paper we want to offer a rethinking of the of scale in such a manner that we move beyond both sedentary and nomadic ontologies (Cresswell 2006), as well as we propose to break with modernist dichotomies such as subject and object. The looking beyond such dualisms also problematizes the separation of nature and culture as well as it rearticulate a focus on seeing the relatedness of entities in the world. The latter

perspective might be termed ‘holistic’ in lack of a better term. The critical point of departure for such a

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No 9 (2021): NORDES 2021: MATTERS OF SCALE, ISSN 1604-9705. www.nordes.org rethinking may be located in many places. Hence, the

thinking within ‘new materialist’ discourse may indeed be helpful here (e.g. Bennett 2010; Tønder 2020).

Moreover, we may seek inspiration in the works of Bruno Latour (2005) and Tim Ingold (2011) as an attempt to ‘blow up’ the confinements of scalar fixities.

In relation to spaces and human practices the work coming out of the so-called ‘mobilites turn’ may be equally fruitful. Thinkers such as John Urry (2000), Mimi Sheller (2018) and Tim Cresswell (2006) with their focus on relations and Mobilities are relevant.

Working from within the area of the mobilities turn John Urry thought rather critically about the notion of scale. In particular what he termed the ‘linear metaphor of scale’ (Urry 2003:122). On par with Latour, Urry saw the social sciences being marked by a simplistic and uncritical scalar thinking. One that relied on the linear metaphor of scale as ‘stretching from the micro level to the macro level, or from the life world to the system’

(ibid.). Rather, Urry argued, we should apply a

metaphor of ‘connections’ as a substitute for the idea of scale. As Urry, Latour saw the metaphor of scale as something that has ‘haunted’ social science and which needed to be substituted by a notion of connections and networks (Latour 2006:212).

Scale suggest that there are levels or layers (their ontological status notwithstanding) which means that one way of thinking about scale is to perceive it as a device for subdivision or analytical dissection (Harvey 1996). Thinking about cities and their components may indeed be compared with an act of analytical dissection or subdivision if we for instance start ‘breaking it down’

into quarters, neighborhoods, streets, blocks, houses etc.

Such scalar dissection furthermore lends itself to a political and organizational perspective since we do not only dissect by scalar levels to increase our analytical understanding, but we may also apply the scalar dissections and levels as organizational principles.

Hence, spatial organizations related to neighborhood councils, city halls, regional assemblies, national parliaments and even supra-national entities such as the European Union or the United Nations. The two scalar logics of spatial analysis and political organization may also fuse into a perception of how to solve problems and transformational challenges. This is for example the case when a political challenge is recognized to be addressed at ‘more levels’ (i.e. scales). Environmental challenges may not adequately be dealt with at local levels only as well as for example the migration crisis needs to be addressed at levels beyond national regulatory frameworks.

SIZING UP – SCALE AS SIZE

Within some quarters of social science the idea of society is synonymous with ‘large scale’. However, already Georg Simmel was aware that society is not a

‘big thing’ but rather a complex of myriad associations and interactions. He renounced the classic analogy of society as being like a body with important organs such as brain, heart etc. Rather he spoke of the ‘numerous unnamed tissues’ that connects the multiple associations (2019:53). So from Simmel and onwards some

sociologist has been able to mobilize a critique of society as ‘big scale’ as well as the distinction between

‘micro and macro’ sociology. In mainstream social science, scale has, however, become synonymous with size. In the word of Latour:

‘Whenever we speak of society, we imagine a massive monument or sphere, something like a huge cenotaph … society, no matter how it is construed to be, has to be something large in scale … the problem is that social scientists use scale as one of the many variables they need to set up before doing the study, whereas scale is what actors achieve by scaling, spacing, and

contextualizing each other through the transportation in specific vehicles of some specific traces’ (Latour 2005: 183-4, Italics in original)

Latour’s position is that ‘scale is the actor’s own achievement’ (p. 184). However, rarely is this accepted since scale tends to be thought of as a ‘well-ordered zoom’ (ibid.). Scaling within the social sciences are, according to Latour, a way of ‘putting things into frame’. Something that is considered disciplinary and scholarly needed in order to bring reality under either control or as an object of knowledge. Latour is not arguing against scalar framings as such, but he problematizes when the effects of scaling are left unacknowledged or un-reflected. The parallel is a

‘zoom’ attempting to order matters smoothly as a set of Russian dolls. He reminds us that: ‘Events are not like tidy racks of clothes in a store. S, M, X, XL labels seam rather confusingly distributed; they wane and wax pretty fast; they shrink or enlarge at lightning speed’ (p.

186). For Latour, the notion of scales within the social science points towards totalizing and ordered

representations forgetful of their own blind spots.

According to Herod, the notion of scale was prior to the 1980s pretty much taken for granted within social science (2011:5). However, a heated debate within human geography led to a positioning of scales as either something real and existing in the world, or as a mental framework imposed on the world. This distinction is the key between a ‘materialist’ and an ‘idealist’ notion of the ontological status of scale (p. 13). However, in line with the thinking of Latour some started to think about scales as ‘topological’ rather than as areal units (p. 23), seeing neither the global nor local as nearly as

interesting as the intermediary arrangements of networks (Latour 2006). If one extends this interest in

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the ‘continuum of links’ across geographies, scale should not only become something which is less fixed and sedentary. It will also need to be understood beyond a mere two-dimensional and plane area. In other words;

scales are volumes and hence three-dimensional (this point will be discussed further below). Coming out of the dispute over the ontological status of scale as something either material or mental, Moore took a different standpoint. Rather than choosing one or the other, Moore argued that one had to make a distinction between scale as a ‘category of practice’ and scale as a

‘category of analysis’ (Herod 2011:35). Such a so-called

‘non-substantial’ approach to scale partly seems to acknowledge (in a very pragmatic sense) that scales might ‘work’ as humans oriented themselves according to these (in politics as in everyday life). Moreover, it lays emphasis on processes and relations as an attempt not to reify scale (p. 37). Bob Jessop and colleagues criticizes a scalar reductionism and essentialism within social science (ibid.). As an outcome of this critical discussion, they used the terms territory, place, scale and network to make a more nuanced placing of scale within the theoretical vocabulary of social science.

METAPHOR OF SCALE / SCALE AS METAPHOR Many theoretical concepts may be fruitfully analyzed from the point of view of metaphor. The literature on metaphors is rich and comprehensive so we cannot do this theme full justice. However, scale has been described by numerous metaphors. First of all, we should acknowledge that ‘metaphor’ means

transportation (Herod 2011; Lakoff & Johnson 1980;

Rigney 2001; Schön 1993). In essence, metaphor is about ‘understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff & Jonhson 1980:5).

So a metaphor ‘transports’ meaning from one semantic domain or context to another. This we know from poetry and arts, but in our everyday life metaphors are prevalent (ibid.). The concept of scale drives its meaning from Latin and hence the notion of ‘scala’ has led ‘stairs’ to be one of the predominant metaphorical references (Herod 2011:15). Seen metaphorically ‘scale as stairs’ then refers both to taxonomy and order, as well as to hierarchy.

We find a number of different scalar metaphors;

ladders, music scales, concentric circles, ‘Russian dolls’, tree roots, earthworm burrows, and spider webs to mention a few (Herod 2011:45-56). Herod and Wright argues that a central dispute related to scale within human geography is whether scale is a material feature that can be ‘seen’ in the landscape, or if they are an arbitrary mental device enabling making sense of the world (2002:5). The dispute over the ontological status of the notion of scale within geography has pitched a set of materialist against idealist assumptions.

According to Herod and Wright, the ontological dispute and the competing metaphors for scale has led to a third key feature related to the discussion of scale within human geography, namely that of the ‘politics of actually producing scale’ (ibid.). More metaphors are, however, within the interpretative horizon of the notion of scale. One such example is the notion of scale as within music where one will find a particular set of tonal intervals as being the defining characteristics of specific scales. Again we see a systematic device that orders particular elements within a structure (however, this time with a sense of dynamics and temporality as its root). However, as we shall see other metaphors have been entering the scalar discussion (networks,

meshworks, rhizzomes etc.). Metaphors that signify less structure and fixity, and more openness and process- orientation.

THE NORMATIVITY OF ‘THE HUMAN SCALE’

Within architecture and urbanism the notion of the

‘human scale’ has more than a descriptive ring to it.

From writers as diverse as Steen Eiler Rasmussen (1959) over Jane Jacobs (1961) to Jan Gehl (1996) the notion of a ‘human scale’ has not only to do with size and proportion, but also with an idea of human values or of taking into consideration the experiences and life conditions of humans. The criticism of modern urban planning with large-scale infrastructures and city-wide systems let to the perspective of the ‘human-centered’

architecture and planning. Taking the position of the human has to do with seeing the designed and ‘made’

world from the point of view of the human body with its sensorial capacities, as well as it has to do with ideas about human flourishing and humanistic values. This is a complex history that we cannot do justice here.

However, the position of Jan Gehl and since his studio

‘Gehl Architects’ have been one of the most

predominant advocates for the ‘human scale’ so here we shall mainly reference their work and thoughts. In the book ‘Soft City – Building Density for Everyday Life’

published by the studio, the position of an urban design with point of departure in the ‘human scale’ is put forward:

‘Human Scale in general terms means dimensions rooted in the human senses and behavior, resulting in smaller built

components and lower heights. In particular, it means designing with attention to the experience at eye level, including appealing to sensory stimuli, and using dimensions that relate to the human body’ (Sim 2019:220)

There is much reason to have sympathy for this approach. Recognizing the positionality of soft bodies and limited sensory capacities (which actually should be the way in which we perceive ourselves as species) do