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.
DEADLINE OF SUBMISSION: 15.02.2019** Call For Participation: Design Culture and Somaesthetics 2019 **
Conference in dialogue between post-disciplinary
fields,
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 journals The 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=enOr submit your proposal (in no more than 300 words with 5 keywords) of a 20-30 minutes presentation to:
conference2019@mome.hu