ID+ is a research unit centered on Design, while extending to further creative areas in Culture and the Arts.

Our strategic vision is focused in the following guidelines:

1. Shifting economies; design as a key driver towards sustainable socio-economic growth and circular economy: unpacking, communicating and facilitating complex, often paradoxical transitions into new industries, market flows, habits, and professions; design as a non-dualistic approach to subject and object, culture and nature, biology and technology, human and animal, action and thought, local and global. This type of research reiterates the core subject of long-term sustainability.
2. Health, ageing and vulnerable populations; design as a contribution to humanisation: defending, promoting and communicating the highest ethical values of human dignity, well-being and freedom.
3. Anticipating and acting upon paradigm shifts in media and technology; the mindful mediation of digital media as a current territory of exponential acceleration, beginning to tap into self-driven levels of complexity beyond human comprehension. Design as a key agent in both the critique and convocation of humane perspectives and action, complementary and informative in face of the allure, advantages and ambivalence of the digital.
4. Territorial and communal empowerment; Earth-centered Design, Green and Sustainable; design as an agent in local ecosystems: integrating vernacular knowledge and practice, contextual heritage, and territorial identity; recovering and reinventing local and regional credentials, symbolic value, and narratives.
5. Immaterial, intangible and material heritage; design and creative/cultural practices as mediators towards acritical revision of modernist and post-modernist concepts of “high culture”, and respective dominant discourses.
6. Devising new educational structures and processes for the above challenges; complementary contributions to the multidisciplinary challenges of decolonisation, gender issues, and locality. A pedagogy that spells “Culture” in its plural form. Furthermore, design as a promoter of scientific knowledge: working with science policy-makers and citizen science programs in order to devise and apply bold ways to combat the ongoing crisis of disinformation.
7. Ensuring the conditions for young research careers stemming from the aforementioned educational contexts, as well as attracting external researchers of excellence; by investing and fully integrating doctoral research in ID+ projects, supporting and articulating Masters-level research as an entry point, advocating for young researcher career positions, ensuring the renewal of the center’s governing bodies, and maintaining a pro-active collaboration with the partner business incubators.