design@cbsCafé

The Copenhagen Business School is an extremely diverse institution — including lawyers, sociologists, political scientists and around 18,000 students.  So perhaps I shouldn’t haven been surprised to find a cluster of people interested in the intersection of business and design.
I happened to arrive in time for the design@ cbs Café.  According to the invitation email from two keen colleagues, Balder Onarheim & Stefan Wiltschnig (both mature PhD students in the Department of Marketing at CBS), the purpose of the event was as follows:
–       to appreciate the diversity of what is currently alive regarding the topic of design at CBS and bring together who is working on it
–       to host a space that allows to share design related research interests and engage in fruitful conversations around them
–       to explore the broad range of design related research opportunities together and meet potential partners for future collaborations

Forty people from across the diversity of CBS responded the  invitation and I think around 25 people showed up.
We started out with the World Cafe — 4 people to a table with the question:
What is my interest regarding design/designing?
I ended up as “host” at the table to I have a list of people who came through the process which gives you a taste of the diversity in the room:
Bo — psychologist interested in the creative process and how designers think
Gitte — interested in human behaviour and perception around design
Daved — the intersection of Art and Science in design, the WorkArts, Creative Enterprise, the Business Arts
Louisa — architect interested in housing (working with one of the business folks on a research project on housing environments)
Liana — knowledge management, collaboration, internet language studies, working in new ways
Lise — working with the fashion design community — knowledge and creativity with relation to outsourcing
Balder — industrial designer, interest in reflective thinking
Jan — economist interested in creating innovative work environments
So you can see there is research happening at CBS on many facets of design + business.
It is interesting to watch another set of people trying to build a Community of Practice — in a different way from us (partly because they have a larger critical mass to work with from an academic background.
Here is some more background from the email invite:
We are a group of people spanning several generations of researchers interested in creativity, design processes and their link to entrepreneurship, management, products and innovation. Our group represents more than four decades of expertise in the field, with interdisciplinary backgrounds ranging from management and organisational studies to anthropology, psychology, cognitive science and industrial design. We share a strong interest in cross fertilization between teaching and researching in the field (i.e. integrated design course, design minor, Creative Encounters, EU DESIRE project) and aim to take advantage of large external research funding opportunities.
A recent call for research-project proposals in the domain of “designing” brought together 40 contributions from various departments and lines of research at CBS. Parallel to that the Danish Ministry of Culture has launched a large mapping initiative of current design-related research in order to take further steps regarding strategies that foster creativity in various aspects of Danish design. All this is embedded in a larger political movement evaluating the potential of “design” as a key competitive advantage for Denmark and the Øresund region.
I’ll track the evolution of design@cbsCafé  — and will report back.

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