Director’s Post:
After we hosted the DCODE Winter School at Design Informatics in Edinburgh in chilly January (see recent video of this), the DCODE Summer School was held in Umeå last week (where the DCODE Twitter captures some of the fun). Many members of Design Informatics (some who are also in RAD Lab) and myself all headed up to Northern Sweden to embrace the (near) midnight sun. This was the backdrop for some exciting days of interdisciplinary design research on challenges of Democratic Data Governance at the Umeå Institute of Design.
DCODE is an EU funded PhD training network of Universities across Europe, including Delft, Amsterdam, Riga, Aarhus, Edinburgh, Umeå, and Copenhagen. There we all participated in the School with lots of discussion on interactions between Design and Governance of emerging AI technologies. This included training such as: working together in a day long hackathon which resulted in some rather cool prototypes; ‘Research Rants’ (where us supervisors presented the trials and tribulations of our career trajectories ); external keynotes; reflective sessions on strategies for community building; and discussion of ‘design landscapes’ based on ‘Prototeam’ group work with external non-academic partners. There was even an interesting mini-conference for PhD researchers to present their work. It was a a great opportunity for supervisors, external partners and most importantly, PhD researchers, to catch up again. Until the next Winter School in Copenhagen!
