On April 1st 2008 RISE members and affiliated researchers met for a colloquium on “Routinizing Innovation” at the Institute of Management of the University of St. Gallen. Central topic of the colloquium was routinization. Moderated by Kathrin Sele, the participants discussed the seminal contribution of Feldman & Pentland (2003) and the empirical application of the concept in Howard-Greenwill (2005).

In a second part of the event Kathrin presented her paper “Routinizing Innovation - A Practice Perspective” which was accepted at the 24th EGOS Colloquium in Amsterdam which was lively discussed by the particicpants.

Simon Grand, Academic Director of RISE developed the concept and co-organized the BIRD Design Research Symposium on “Creating New Realities Today” at the 4th and 5th April 2008 in Basel. Furthermore, he moderated the panel discussion on “Design Research and Meaning: Enacting New Tecnologies". Prof. Rolf Pfeifer, Director of the AILab of the University Zurich and Member of the RISE Advisory Board held a presentation on “How the body shapes the way we think: Design Principles for Intelligent Systems".

About the BIRD Research Symposium:
Designers enact and shape the realities as they are in the present, and they create and realize new realities and future possibilities. Designers work on the contingency of the world as it is, and they explore the world as it could be. It is this particular character of a design-specific way of knowing and acting, which is at the core of the BIRD Design Research Symposium 2008 in Basel. The research focus of the conference is on describing, understanding and explaining design as a way of creating new realities, on exploring, discussing and comparing multiple approaches and strategies of designers in this perspective, as well as on their study in design research.

Creating new realities relates to a core dimension of design and the design process in general; the BIRD Symposium 2008 will particularly focus on this core dimension in the context of the present situation: How do designers create new realities, at the beginning of the 21st century? What are particular opportunities and challenges of designing today? Thereby, it will be interesting to discuss, whether they ways in which designers create new realities is particular today or whether is essentially the same independent of specific contexts and situations; whether their interpretations of recent developments and current challenges influences their ways of creating new realities. In essence, we are thus interested in understanding the particular repertoires and ways of knowing, which are important for design practice and design theory today.

BIRD Design Symposium Website