10th UNIDCOM/IADE International Conference Senses & Sensibility, Lisbon

This biannual conference, organized by UNIDCOM/IADE and hosted by IADE – Universidade Europeia, aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to present their research, explore contemporary agendas, discuss emerging directions and future challenges that are at the forefront of design research. This event will also serve to celebrate UNIDCOM’s 20th anniversary and IADE’s 50th anniversary. The conference theme – Lost in (G)localization, will foster new thinking towards a compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue regarding the role that design plays in addressing societal and organisational issues. Glocal became popular during the 1980s, being one buzzword of the beginning of the nineties’. Glocalization, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica[1], is “the simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems. The term, a linguistic hybrid of globalization and localization, was popularized by the sociologist Roland Robertson[2] and coined, according to him, by Japanese economists to explain Japanese global marketing strategies. (…) In the marketing context, glocalization means the creation of products or services for the global market by adapting them to local cultures.” More than 30 years afterwards, the notion of glocalization still entails an interesting and pertinent question for design, which this conference aims to discuss: How to design for the interconnectedness of global and local events in an increasingly fluid world[3]?

[1] Blatter, J. (2013). Glocalization. In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/glocalization

[2] Robertson, R. (1995). Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash & R. Robertson (Eds.), Global Modernities (pp.25-44). London: Sage Publications.

[3] Manzini, E. (2019). Politics of the Everyday. London: Bloomsbury