Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
PAPERS: Discourses in Design Research: Critiques, Black-Boxes, and Translations Location: 40 George Square, LG.11 Zoom Link Accessibility: https://www.accessable.co.uk/the-university-of-edinburgh/central-area/access-guides/george-square-40-lecture-theatres Session Chair: Haian Xue, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University | |
    | |
Historicising Speculative Design with McLuhan’s Tetrad Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA This paper introduces and applies Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad model, grounded in critical media studies, as an interpretative framework for analysing corporate concept videos as design fictions. Through a close reading of seven videos, we identify three recurring themes: present as future, the rhetoric of the new and socio-economic utopia. In parallel, the two diagonals of the Tetrad reveal contrasting orientations: the enhances-obsolesces diagonal reflects a corporate anticipatory (non-radical) future, whereas the retrieves-reverses diagonal is more critical and disruptive. We discuss figure-ground reversal as a key strategy for historicising corporate concept videos and suggest how the Tetrad can foster historical reflexivity in speculative design. View Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.479
| |
