The Workshop

When I arrived at the Design Research Jamboree, I didn’t know quite what to expect — and that was the point. The word “Jamboree,” as the organizers reminded us, was chosen deliberately. Like Baden-Powell’s original scout gatherings (Baden-Powell coined the term for large international gatherings of Scouts. When asked why he chose it, he famously replied, “What else would you call it?” — a phrase the Design Research Jamboree organizers borrowed to signal their own open, experimental spirit), it signaled something open-ended, experimental, and lightly mischievous. It wasn’t a symposium or a retreat. It was something else entirely — a temporary suspension of the ordinary rhythms of academic life, and an invitation to see what would happen when design researchers lived, worked, and made together for five days in a quiet corner of England’s Lake District.

What unfolded felt more like a field study of ourselves — of design researchers as we think, build, and improvise meaning. The photographs later published in the DRS 2024 pictorial capture this beautifully: the half-finished diagrams, the tangle of notes strung across a window, the moments of quiet concentration punctuated by bursts of laughter or debate. These were not the tidy artifacts of a finished project but the traces of a process in motion — what the authors called the “nuggets of jamboree-ality.”

The setting mattered more than I expected. We were surrounded by misty hills, long walks, and sudden weather — an environment that encouraged us to “muck about,” to work through ideas with our hands, and to let go of the usual disciplinary strictness that conferences often demand. There was an afternoon by the lake where a few of us began tapping stones together in rhythm, an unplanned performance that somehow said more about collaboration than any keynote could. I remember thinking: this is what “research through design” feels like when it escapes its parentheses — when it becomes less about producing outcomes and more about inhabiting questions.

Much of what made the Jamboree memorable was its refusal to over-structure itself. We made sketches, maquettes, sculptures, diagrams, and speculative taxonomies. We debated the aesthetics of discipline and the politics of participation. Some participants illustrated “postcards from the Jamboree.” Others simply observed — taking photographs, writing fragments, or tending to conversations that drifted beyond the work itself. These in-between moments — a walk, a shared meal, a small discovery — became as much a part of the research as any formal activity.

Looking back, I think what the Jamboree accomplished wasn’t consensus or clarity, but confidence: a kind of collective permission to practice research differently. To be comfortable with messiness. To let dialogue, gesture, and environment shape the inquiry. As one of the paper’s authors put it, the event championed “being extraordinarily confident with messiness, chaos, and tensions.” And in doing so, it reminded me that design research isn’t just something we talk about — it’s something we do, together, in place, in time, and in the company of others.

When I left, I carried with me the faint echo of that rhythmic stone tapping, the smell of wet wood, and the sense that what we were doing was both fragile and necessary. Research through design needs its jamborees — those rare moments when we set aside productivity long enough to rediscover curiosity. What else would you call it?

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