Research Groups
	Center for Cultural Design Games Research Group Human Computer Interaction

Center for Cultural Design

The Center for Cultural Design (CCD) is a research group seeking to expand and enhance design-focused research that has emerged in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, the School of Architecture, and elsewhere at Rensselaer during the past several years. Cross-disciplinary inquiry and teaching on campus have already produced a number of important steps, including the formation of the program in Product Design and Innovation. Now it is time to move ahead, organizing initiatives in research and graduate education aimed at developing the special combination of intellectual and practical interests that have evolved here.

Cultural design is analogous to environmental design in its potential for improving the relationship between technological change and the quality of life. Environmental design seeks not only improved impact on nature, but also making better use of natural materials and processes. Similarly, cultural design not only strives to make technologies more appropriate for their social context, but also to make better use of culture itself as a resource for innovation.

We hope to see the CCD encompass multiple research strategies. Participatory design, in which users are directly involved in the innovation process, has the potential to include groups typically marginalized in social power (e.g. by race, class, and gender), and thus better realize their needs, perspectives, and creativity. Similar strategies termed "social design," "user-centered design," "design for democracy," etc. have also been suggested as alternatives which can make technologies more appropriate for their social context.

Another group of research strategies draws on culture itself as a design resource, using concepts such as "cultural capital" or "local assets". Here researchers develop designs to translate local cultural capital (vernacular knowledge, social networks, etc.) into the kinds of capital that can empower marginalized social groups.

We envision the CCD as a place that will facilitate experiments in these areas, interpret the results, and explore associated issues ranging from collective intellectual property to technological democracy. This will require the development of theories and methods in the social sciences potentially useful to professionals and organizations centrally involved with design. Two decades of inquiry by scholars in S.T.S. and related fields have produced an array of ideas and approaches ripe for application in the shaping of new devices and systems. There are exciting possibilities for linking this new social science scholarship to the practices of design in industry and communities, in both national and international contexts.

• Lab Associates
  
• CCD Website