The UnCentre for [ ] Design Research

The UnCentre for [ ] Design Research aims to establish a dynamic research ecology that supports critically responsive, methodologically diverse, and ethically grounded design inquiry.  

This orientation aligns directly with the Faculty of Creative Art & Communication’s Environment Plan for Research and Knowledge Exchange, which seeks to cultivate positive and sustainable opportunities for all, alongside a vibrant, inclusive, and critically engaged research culture.  

Specifically, The U[ ]DR draws from—and contributes to—staff research trajectories, postgraduate development, and undergraduate teaching. It supports research-integrated learning, creates opportunities for students to work with live and emergent design questions, and connects across key research clusters including Environmental Futures, Critical & Creative Narratives, and Creative Pedagogies.  

As both a research ecology and a learning environment, The U[ ]DR strengthens Falmouth’s capacity for ongoing, responsive, and future-facing design research. 

The U[ ]DR builds on a set of design-led conceptual frameworks that (re)conceive design as relational, entangled, and implicated in the ongoing configuration of social, material, and ecological conditions. Foundational to this orientation are Tony Fry’s work on redirective design and defuturing (2009); Anne-Marie Willis’s articulation of ontological design (2006); and Arturo Escobar’s development of pluriversal design and relational ontologies (2018). Together, these theorists reposition design not as a mechanism for producing fixed solutions but as a practice through which worlds, relations, and possibilities are continually shaped. 

The U[ ]DR is further informed by contemporary movements that interrogate design’s complicity in extractive and unsustainable systems. Matthew Wizinsky’s Design After Capitalism (2022) for example, provides a critical vocabulary for examining the political and economic infrastructures that condition design practice. In parallel, speculative, adversarial, and discursive approaches in design offer precedents for treating design as a mode of inquiry and critique—foregrounding the negotiation of meaning, value, and relation rather than the pursuit of resolved outcomes. The U[ ]DR also draws on wider critical traditions—including feminist, posthuman, and decolonial scholarship—which contribute methodological and ethical orientations concerned with situated knowledge, relationality, interdependence, and the plurality of existing worlds.