UNIDCOM/IADE

Linha de investigação em Marketing e Comunicação / Marketing and Communication/research group

General Objectives

This research group suffered a severe loss with the death of Andrew Lancaster, one of the most active researchers in the whole unit. Andrew died on the 5th of June 2007 and left us the legacy of his research project approved for funding. This group will therefore continue its formal autonomous existence devoted to the conclusion of that research project:

“Linking Business-to-Business relationship management inputs with financial and objective outcomes”

We will also organize the following conference: “S&S in Tech II in 2009” with a double blind peer review system aiming at 120 presentations and the publication of the proceedings book.

Most of the objectives associated with advertising and communication sciences will be integrated in the research strategies linked with Material Culture and most of the objectives associated with Marketing research may be connected with the sciences of Design.

Main Achievements

Two of our researchers got a doctoral degree in this period: Andrew Lancaster and Eduarda Margarido Pires.

Linha de investigação em Cultura Material e Ciências do Design / Material Culture and Sciences of Design/ research group

This Research Group, affiliated around the idea of Material Culture, aims to conduct valuable research in the interdisciplinary area that includes: Cultural Studies, Visual Anthropology and Sociology, Design and Art History, Aesthetics, Social Philosophy, and Gender & Multi-Cultural Studies with the integrative power of Science and Technology.

We acknowledge the fact that Portugal has a particular situation (both historical as geographical) that holds a possible chance of creating, in the future, an important research community, that will be able to address, from a Historic and Theoretical point of view, the question of a possible Designology.

We acknowledge that even historically, Design research problems are characterized for being multi-disciplinary. No research discipline alone is able to define a comprehensive set of research questions able to expose a design research problem.

We also acknowledge the fact that Design disciplines are, primarily, of visual dominance, most of all having been created from “Disegno” (an Italian word that originated from the words “Desenho” and “Diseño”) and translated as “Design”.

We therefore aim to place a particular culture of production, characteristic to countries where the same word designates or designated “drawing” and “project” in general: The CPLP countries and Italy.

We also pretend, through the journal “The (radical) Designist”, www.iade.pt/designist, to define a particularly social attitude, which the Design research community may expect from our studies.

We aim to expand the design culture studies by embracing literature, film, music and other cultural forms as parts of set symptoms of a particular projectual culture.

We therefore pretend to explore the research abilities of the team, in order to apply for funding for sponsor/support one exemplary multidisciplinary project of this research strategy.

Main Achievements

The research group collaborated intensively in the organization of the 3 major conferences held by UNIDCOM/IADE.

The 2003, 2005 and 2006 international conferences were devoted to this line of research and were important achievements for networking and benchmarking. The research activities in this area, see: www.iade.pt/sst; www.iade.pt/cumulus and www.iade.pt/drs2006

One of our team members, Eduardo Côrte-Real, was an elected member of the Design Research Society Council and an invited member of CURE, a special working group for research within Cumulus. Another member, Carlos Duarte, was nominated co-director for NATO - Advanced Research Workshop (ARW): Hypermedia Seduction for Terrorist Recruiting; Eilat, Israel, from the 17th - 21th of September 2006, being a special group that appoints to the correlation between Design and Jihad.

Two of our team members are currently doing post-doctoral research in USA Universities: José Manuel Bártolo in Princeton University and Maria Theresa Beco do Lobo at the Carnegie Mellon University. Seven of our researchers got a doctoral degree in this period: André Ribeiro, Theresa Lobo, José Manuel Bártolo, Lourdes Riobom, Maria Helena Souto, Vítor Flor Gaspar and Isabel Alçada. Unfortunately, Isabel Maria Alçada Cardoso passed away recently, but the University of Seville awarded to her, her doctoral degree.

One of our collaborators, José Filipe Costa was accepted in the Royal College of Art PhD program and Ana Mestre in the Delft University Most of the main achievements are already described in the main report for the whole unit.