As a distraction from finishing a PhD it’s may or may not be a good thing to be offered money to entice you away from the screen and make you do something else for a while. This inevitably leads back to the screen which in my case this year would lead me to work on a parallel blog for the Design Research Society exploring the history of the organisation which also maps onto the history of design research.
The culmination of this research would be a presentation at the DRS 50th anniversary conference which took place in Brighton at the end of June. From March to June, in between writing up the final chapters and then submitting a thesis, I would spend some distracting, diverting and entertaining moments talking to members of the DRS who were involved in setting it up or in the running of early conferences. This led to the creation of a number of blog posts on the DRS conference website and a twitter feed that would recreate the early conferences as they happened. This feed is embedded below – it’s a bit of a brantub – dig deep and find treasure. The DRS 2016 posts will be added to this blog in due course and the PhD corrections will be completed shortly.