Editorial: Making in the Digital Era

Abstract

Experiential Knowledge Special Interest Group (EKSIG) focusses on the understanding of ‘knowledge’ and ‘contribution to knowledge’ in design research, especially in the areas where designing forms part of the research process. The EKSIG strand at DRS2024 takes a closer look at the new and changing materiality of design practice that we, designers, face, due to digitalization and its challenges and benefits. Several areas of design practice and research involve processes of making things. More often such processes unfold in a hybrid form combining both making by hand and with tools, both analogue and digital. This year’s EKSIG strand focusses on discussing the theme ‘Making in the Digital Era’ that illuminates designers’ insider perspectives on making and embodied experience in hybrid analogue and digital material processes. The blurry border between the two modalities enables the designers to delve themselves into the hybrid environment of making in which they can move seamlessly between the analogue and the digital – but what happens with the experiential knowledge of materials in this process? Being insiders in such processes, designers can provide insights into their direct embodied experience in hybrid processes and contribute to the theoretical discussion of ways of knowing and how they use their experiential knowledge in this transition from the analogue to the digital realm – and back. The EKSIG strand provides a forum for discussing the concept of ‘thinking in making’ in design research that entails action and perception coupling, which results in artifacts as extensions of the designer-researcher’s experience.