PRR Project

Summary

ProfileDesign researcher with knowledge, experience and skills involving working with multiple scientific disciplinesAbility to act as interface between disciplines towards mutual lexical and epistemological translation of scientific knowledge across complementary skills in applied researchAn ability to lead responses to contemporary socio-cultural and technological challenges that display a degree of complexity that requires concerted efforts and multiple viewpoints.Rationale:Despite a current multitude of fronts addressing the translation of scientific knowledge to the general public, even collaborating with citizens in the production of this knowledge (Ciência Viva, Ciência Cidadã and SciCom at the forefront of this ambition in the Portuguese context), a gap remains largely untapped when it comes to inter-disciplinary, reciprocal knowledge among disciplines. This problem is even felt in multi-disciplinary projects applying in funding bids: there is an ongoing difficulty in assessing said projects in a holistic manner, instead scattering their overall poise throughout a range of partial, disciplinary perspectives.This is essentially a lexical, epistemological and methodological issue: each field possesses its own viewpoint, vocabulary, and methods. As a consequence, despite the allure of the concept of “interdisciplinarity”, this fails to materialise when it comes to cross-disciplinary innovation: researchers and stakeholders often lack a mutual understanding and expect their premises, however tacitly, to be universally understood and adopted. Various research projects at ID+ have not only addressed this issue, they have often felt the aforementioned constraint - and in the process, these projects have been able to make the case for communication design to configure complex epistemologies towards trans-disciplinary literacy.We believe the time is right for “Design for Science” to be acknowledged as a poised specialisation in the discipline of Design, and as such, we argue for the need to assign a high-ranking researcher with the task of leading this process. As a consequence, through the employment of communication design, we expect to overcome cognitive dissonances between the exact sciences, the health sciences, the social sciences and humanities. This mission will be tested and validated in contexts of applied research, student internships, and curricular activity. We acknowledge the following:The mission of trans-disciplinary advancement is available across Faculties of U.Porto, namely through existing projects, partnerships and supervisions;The four ID+ hubs offer further outreach with a critical mass of national and international networks;International networks ensure scalability of this field we intend to lead. Main tasks to be undertaken are as follows:Devising programs of scientific literacy in close connection with ID+ led Portuguese Design Schools network [PDSN] (ID+ OBS);Coordinating the issue of scientific literacy guidelines with governing bodies;Leading multidisciplinary contexts that require lexical, epistemological and methodological inter-legibility;Creating opportunities for applied research that requires complementary knowledge and converging, contributions from distinct fields;Overcoming disciplinary hermeticism by revising, testing and validating communication tools and templates for inter-legibility;Liaising with potential partners, funding bodies and venture capitalists;Reverting the aforementioned opportunities and contexts to:applied and strategic research projects;knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship;curricular insertion towards specialised degrees and/or modules in existing courses: BA (skills in designing for scientific literacy), MA (skills in mediating inter-disciplinary knowledge), PhD (skills in initiating trans-disciplinary projects).The above to be developed in three scales: 1. At U.Porto 2. Scaleable to aforementioned PDSN 3. Scaleable among international partner networks.