Authorship, as compound noun, harks back to the Latin auctor, meaning "one who carries forward or increases," and is linked to the suffix -ship, transposing its concreteness into a certain action, fact, or relation. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the term first appears in the 18th century, when also patents and licenses start to operate for codifying what a scientific work should be, explicitly orienting it towards standardization. Within this perspective, and even more today, authorship embodies a sort of cultural nightmare and academic obsession because of the favor that research — based on automatic parameters, on the number of citations and patents, measurable scientific impact and quantitative analysis — globally receives from the funding institutions and consequently from the academic ones. However, author/ship today claims for more complex dynamics, at least for some reasons. If there is no doubt that, regardless of the disciplinary specificities, the researcher must face the where and how knowledge production becomes authorial, it is also undeniable how much the emergent technologies, the openness of sources, and the growing technification of processes are reframing both ongoing research agencies and the meaning of authorship itself.
Design-driven research is not exception, nowadays undergoing profound changes due to the emergence of an expanded idea of the design realm, more reticular and multidirectional. To the point that even doctoral/independent/personal research, rather than being the product of a single situated author, often relies on specific tactical constructs aimed at binding together heterogeneous disciplines and contributions without expecting a unified and coherent outcome. Both in terms of techniques and of approach, we see how research on, by, and for design, today, works as a connector between different sets of knowledge, enlightens dismissed historiographies, and introduces lateral perspectives, by assembling heterogeneous and preexisting fragments in new and unexpected narrations.
The Milan CA2RE Conference seeks to investigate possible forms of authorship vis-a-vis the contemporary knowledge production and dissemination within the design and artistic domains. We aim to question the role of the author and the sense of originality at present times when design and artistic research-based practices often experiment with different operating strategies. We welcome contributions reflecting on the techniques and the processual approaches involved in constructing specific narratives, aiming to affirm the roles and modes of authorship, by positioning them in the contemporary cultural contexts of design-driven and artistic research.
The Milan CA²RE Conference is promoted by the Ph.D. Program in Architectural, Urban and Interior Design (AUID) and the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU) at Politecnico di Milano.