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Call for Participation: Design Culture & Somaesthetics Conference, Budapest

20 Jan 2019 (All Day)

Registration for this event has passed

The Doctoral School of Moholy-Nagy University of Art&Design, Budapest and the Hungarian Forum of Somaesthetics warmly invites you to the *Design Culture and Somaesthetics Conference 2019*:

Conference Date: *06-08. 05. 2019.*
Conference Venue: Moholy-Nagy University of Art&Design, Budapest

Confirmed keynote speakers:

*Richard Shusterman*, Professor of Philosophy and English, Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities, and Director for Body, Mind and Culture at Florida Atlantic University. Initiatior of somaesthetic research.

*Guy Julier*, Professor of Design Leadership at Aalto University, Helsinki. Former Principal Research Fellow in Contemporary Design and Professor of Design Culture at the University of Brighton/Victoria & Albert Museum. Author of founding books on design culture studies, editorial board member of the Journal of Visual Culture and Design and Culture.

*Patrick Devlieger*, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at KU Leuven, anthropologist, leading international researcher of disability studies.

In the recent past, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research has provided remarkable progress and development within the humanities and social sciences. The early phase of this development witnessed preliminary dialogues between separate disciplines and their representatives who have gathered to discuss common interests. The  initial goal was to understand each other, to recognize common topics of  research. This phase induced productive dialogues but did not lead to  long lasting, organized post-disciplinary projects, let alone  integrative conceptual frameworks.

The latter only started in a second phase, when emerging  post-disciplinary fields began to make suggestions for research  platforms that were more defined and methodologically better founded.  Somaesthetics, initiated by Richard Shusterman, and design culture  studies, initiated by Guy Julier among others, are two among these most  promising new post-disciplines.

Design discourses, practices and products that are constituted in the  synergy of all our senses are the protagonists of design culture studies  that takes design culture as a flow of cultural products produced by  social practices and reflected in cultural discourses. To Julier’s mind,  design culture as an object of study includes both the material and  immaterial aspects of everyday life. At the same time, somaesthetics  explores and reconceptualizes the focal point and ultimate reference of  human environments, products, practices and discourses, namely, the  embodied experience. Whereas somaesthetics reflects the pragmatist  understanding of philosophy as a means of improving experience through a  reflective art of living, it defines itself as a tool for designing good  life. According to Shusterman, somaesthetics is the critical,  meliorative study of the experience and the use of one’s body as a locus  of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning devoted  to the knowledge, discourses and disciplines that structure such somatic  care or can improve it. 

Both design culture studies and somaesthetics are interested in  body-mind interactions and both include theory, methodology and practice  alike within their action radius.

The purpose of this conference is to take a step backward and address  design theorists, philosophers, anthropologists, aestheticians, social  scientists, healthcare professionals, technology experts, artists,  designers and educators to discuss the parallel and complementary  possibilities of these post-disciplinary approaches in the spirit of  initial dialogue and pragmatic goodwill in order to create platforms of  fulfilling and fruitful future collaborations. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Somaesthetic aspects of user experience
  • Virtual reality, immersive technologies
  • Posthumanism, Artificial intelligence and embodiedness
  • Human-computer interaction
  • Ambient experience design
  • Atmospheres in human environments
  • Social body and experience society
  • Everyday aesthetics
  • Object biography, material memory and material engagement 

We are expecting original and unpublished articles. A selection of the  papers will be published in the forthcoming issues of the peer-reviewed,  online, academic research journalsThe Journal of Somaesthetics and Pragmatism Today or in a volume on somaesthetics and design based on  the conference and published in the Brill series Studies in Somaesthetics/. 

Further details and online submission at:  https://doktori.mome.hu/conference-2019/?lang=en Or submit your proposal (in no more than 300 words with 5 keywords) of a  20-30 minutes presentation to: conference2019@mome.hu

20 Jan 2019 (All Day)

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