We are excited to announce that Tara Karpinski will be conducting her research project on Design for Collective Decision Making for CARADT as a Professional Doctorate Arts + Creative
candidate. The Professional Doctorate program, which sits between academia and professional practice, allows candidates to conduct research that directly contributes to the development of their professional field. In her research, Tara focuses on on designing interfaces for emerging collective decision making processes — a critical area as digital technologies and democratic processes become ever more intertwined.
The Professional Doctorate (PD) is a unique research trajectory aimed at experienced professionals seeking to make a substantial impact in their industry through research. Unlike the primarily academic traditional PhD, the PD emphasizes applied research that leads to tangible innovations in practice. The program is divided into seven research domains. For the Arts + Creative research domain, Tara explores how collective decision making can be designed and implemented in ways that are transparent, equitable, and inclusive. Her research project builds on her own experiences working as part of a collective, and research conducted with other commons communities.
Design for Collective Decision Making will involve case studies with different partners, including the Community Land Trust H-buurt, together with whom she prototyped an interface for a means of decision-making called quadratic voting. Tara will continue to collaborate closely with a number of diverse collectives and other stakeholders. This work is expected to contribute significantly to both the academic discourse on collective decision making and the practical development of new interfaces and methods.
Design for Collective Decision Making highlights the often-overlooked role of interface design in shaping democracy itself. The research examines the design of voting interfaces—who creates them, the principles guiding their development, and the broader political, social, and technological mandates that shape them. It explores how design choices can influence voter behaviors and trust in democratic processes.
‘My practice is situated in between different actors, in this shape-shifting middle many things can happen.’
Tara Karpinski is a designer, researcher and educator working in the realm of social practice. She holds a BA in photography and art history from the Savannah College of Art & Design (USA), and an MA from the Sandberg Instituut (NL). Her Master studies were funded by a Netherland-America Foundation grant.
The research group Situated Art, Design and Technology (SADT) focuses on the societal embedding and embodiment of knowledge production that art and design research enables. The conducted research contributes to a deeper understanding of technological developments and their impact on people, society, and the environment, and to the development of situated approaches in the creative sector and beyond. In doing so, it advances a wider acknowledgement of artistic and design research as a mode of knowledge production, one that is grounded in creativity and critical imagination as a way of generating insight into, and intervening in, societal transitions driven by technology.
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