Design competition towards sustainability: A case study of Low2No international competition in Finland

Design competition towards sustainability: A case study of Low2No international competition in Finland

Liang, Z.

2014-02-13

In current mitigating-climate-change scenario, the urbanized area is believed to be crucial to the sustainable development of our living environment. In this respect, the low2No international competition has been recently held in Finland with an attempt to trigger systematic change on sustainable development nationally toward a low carbon future. In order to stimulate the systematic change, new competition forms are set rather than following the firm competition tradition in the country. The low2No international design competition is expected to serve as vehicle not only produces sustainable design solutions but also collect and distribute replicable knowledge on sustainability. Therefore, the low2No international design competition provided a new paradigm of design competitions to promote long-term sustainability design strategies in Finland. By examining the applicability of analytical concepts of ‘boundary objects’-BO (Star & Griesemer, 1989) and ‘trading zones’-TZ (Galison, 1997), international design competition can be scientifically analyzed in order to avoid so-called ‘complicit relationship’ of design competition researches. Moreover, the procedural innovations of design competition can be elevated and analyzed based on BO and TZ approach. In this paper, we follow this line of research and propose to consider international design competition as devices designed to produce new ‘trading zones’ (Liang & Mäntysalo, 2013, in press). Particularly in the Low2No international competition, the procedural analysis on a magnitude of relevant documents, including design completion egulations, procedures, issues, the different roles of stake-holders and their individual perspectives is to be introduced by tracing the development of BO and TZ alongside the whole competition. Questions on how the design and planning issues are formed, interacted and solved and what factors affect the competition process through the Low2No international competition will be answered as preliminary findings

international design competitions
procedural innovations
sustainability design strategy
systematical change

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Conference proceedings

conference paper

(c) 2014 Liang, Z.