Violet Owen, one of our PhD candidates, is attending DRS 2022 in Bilbao, let’s ask her a few questions …
What’s your research area?
My research focuses on Creative Evaluation (CE), and how CE can be used to better establish the impacts generated by Social Innovations.
Tell us about the paper you’re presenting.
The paper is called ‘Evaluating Social Innovations (SI), how Creative Evaluation (CE) can help articulate their values and impacts’ and it was co-authored with Pinar Ceyhan, Leon Cruickshank and Elisavet Christou. It presents an overview of the current evaluation processes used to evaluate social value and identifies the shortcomings or problems many of these processes face. It then explores Creative Evaluation as a potential area for evaluation research to expand into, that may mitigate some of the challenges of evaluating SIs.
What other activities are you doing?
Pinar Ceyhan, Elisavet Christou and myself are also running an online workshop during DRS, titled ‘Exploring the Biophysical Context’, which aims to provide a space for participants to explore what the biophysical context is, how evaluation can be used to expand into the biophysical context and what it can offer to individuals own research and practice. I am also a co-author of another paper being presented at DRS authored by Mirian Calvo and Rosendy Galabo titled ‘Strategies and Tactics of Participatory Architecture’, and I am going to be taking part in the DRS PhD Events.
What are you looking forward to the most?
Meeting other design researchers in person. But also watching my colleagues present their papers, and lots of tapas!
Have you any suggestions or tips for people attending their first in-person conference?
This will be my first conference I am attending in person, but I’ve been told to network as much as I can, see as much as I can, and enjoy every moment.
Violet Owen