Strategic Design Research Journal - Special Issue on 'Design contributions for the COVID-19 global emergency'

The 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic disease (COVID-19), appeared for the first time in Wuhan (Hubei Province, China) in late 2019 and rapidly spread in the rest of the world since the early months of 2020, has produced a significant and sadly dramatic impact in the life of all people. To date (April 22th, 2020), over 2.550.000 people have shown symptoms and over 175.000 died for health and respiratory problems [1]. While the entire humanity feels dangerously powerless at the same time an unprecedented amount of initiatives across the world have shown human creativity and resilience. The entire scientific community is cohesive in facing this emergency and the severe health-related issues that have arisen in the last months.

In this unparalleled scenario, the global Design community is called to act. And it is doing it! The new instances pointed out by the global emergencies allow reflecting to the ways the Design discipline can answer to unprecedented phenomena, with the will to foresee likely

CITIES IN A CHANGING WORLD: QUESTIONS OF CULTURE, CLIMATE AND DESIGN

Dates: 16-18 June 2021

Location: Virtual / New York. City Tech, CUNY

Website: AMPS21-NY

1st deadline for submissions: 30 June 2020

A conference on architecture, urbanism, planning, sociology, health, environments, infrastructure and economies.

The premise of this conference is that the city is a site of interconnected problems. No single issue dominates its needs. No single discipline has the answers to its questions. As a result, the range of issues we deal with is vast. Urban designers are developing new models of settlement planning to address housing needs. Architects are renovating ever more existing buildings. Infrastructure designers are developing faster modes of transportation. Planners are demanding lower C02 emissions from industry. Health professionals are rethinking movement in the city. Policy makers are addressing grass-roots demands for regional governance.

While all such issues respond to unique and independent demands, they are all interrelated. Climate change is a perfect example. Scientists, policy makers, activists and designers the world over are engaged in the issue. Some focus on rehousing displaced peoples, others challenge throwaway culture and stress reuse. Health professionals examine disaster relief while planners look at shared transport models. Environmentalists seek to reduce energy consumption, while communities plan for resilience. At the same time, economists look to finance cleaner industries. In tackling a particular issue then, multiple disciplines are overlapping and drawing on the work of others. In short, their work is reaching beyond the boundaries of individual fields.

In looking at the city as a site of such inherent interdisciplinarity, the conference venue offers insights. New York is a city of over 8 million people. It has an affordable housing problem and, located on the coast, is threatened by rising sea levels. The site for the United States’ most iconic historic buildings, it demands 21st Century uses of them. The home of the US public health movement in the 19th Century, it is at the forefront of the healthy city agenda today. Historically a landing port for immigrants it knows the pressures of displacement and migration. A city for the wealthiest elites in the world, it exhibits poverty, social exclusion and periodic cultural tensions.

In this place, as in cites the world over, none of the issues that vex the metropolis are isolated, and none of their factors, consequences or responses are limited to single disciplines.

Disciplines & Themes

Whether we are architects, planners, infrastructural designers, transport engineers, policy makers, social activists or health professionals the work we do is informed by and informs the work of other fields when applied. On that basis, this conference seeks to explore best practices in:

Urban Design | Architecture | Sustainability | Engineering | Housing | Public Health | Sociology | Economics | Business | Governance | Art and Culture  |  History

Participants in these discipline areas are invited to propose ‘lead themes’. Reflecting the expertise of the City Tech, proposed themes include:

Cumulus 2020 - Design Culture(s)

The Sapienza University of Rome will host the Annual Cumulus Conference in June 2020 about the theme of “Design Culture (s)”.

Aligned with the vision of Cumulus Association, the aim of the Conference is to map the most advanced research and education in design, by reflecting on the idea of design as a form of culture, while drawing its field and opening to new directions.

Design Culture(s) is investigating not simply on the concept of culture as a monolithic expression of a specific knowledge that reflects on itself, but as the product of an investigation that is open to many different “Cultures” which are emerging and revolving around it in society, in the places, and in history.

Design as an expression of Culture(s) is taking into consideration the cultures we are inheriting from the past and which should be granted for the benefit of future generations, so intertwining past and future, tangible and intangible, innovation and tradition. This is the time when it is urgent to multiply the opportunities for knowledge sharing and dissemination, in order to tackle the cultural, societal, economic, technological and industrial shifts of the future, through design education and research.

The Conference is organized into 9 parallel tracks in order to address several different Cultures of Design. Each track is described with only three keywords to tackle and explore all possible approaches, methods, visions, experiments that can draw the scenario of different Design Cultures. Therefore, authors are invited to send innovative, original, inspiring and disruptive ideas in their contributions.

CULTURE (OF) ARTIFICIAL _ DIGITAL | TECHNOLOGY | ROBOTICS
CULTURE (OF) LANGUAGES _ AESTHETICS | EXPRESSION | VISUAL
CULTURE (OF) LIFE _ NATURE | BIOLOGY | HUMAN
CULTURE (OF) MAKING _ PROCESS | MANUFACTURING | POST-INDUSTRY
CULTURE (OF) MULTIPLICITY _ GENDER | PLURALISM | DIVERSITY
CULTURE (OF) PROXIMITY _ PLACES | PEOPLE | ECONOMY
CULTURE (OF) RESILIENCE _ SOCIAL INNOVATION | CIRCULAR ECONOMY | SUSTAINABILITY
CULTURE (OF) REVOLUTION _ CRITICAL THINKING | DISRUPTION | CHANGE
CULTURE (OF) THINKING _ THEORY | HISTORY | CRITICS

The selected papers and posters will be published in the Conference Proceedings (with ISBN).

To submit your long abstract, go to the website.

Object Subject - National Design Writing Conference, Canberra

Calling designers, writers, bloggers, publishers, researchers, collectors and design lovers.  Object Subject: 2019 National Design Writing Conference is an international platform for writers to address design as a positive change agent in society.

At the inaugural national design writing conference, Object Subject (2017), keynote speaker and NY Times design critic Alice Rawsthorn called on the design sector to take seriously their responsibilities – social, environmental and ethical. This clarion call, teamed with multiple requests from national and international design writers to repeat the event, is a catalyst for the second design writing conference.

Presented as part of the popular DESIGN Canberra festival, Object Subject: 2019 National Design Writing Conference will build on the successful inaugural event, which inspired new conversations, connections and ideas, questioned the very role and responsibility of design,

ABE Journal - Entanglements of Architecture and Comfort beyond the Temperate Zone

Section guest-edited by Jiat-Hwee Chang, National University of Singapore (Singapore) and Daniel Ryan, University of Sydney (Australia).

The dominant discourse on comfort in architecture today is one that is seen as both universal—with slight variations across different geographies, climates, cultures, and societies—and ahistorical—timeless in that comfort is premised on supposedly immutable human biological responses to the environment. The universalist claims—in both space and time, across geographies and histories—of the discourse on comfort are typical of any technoscientific constructions in which technological and scientific developments are deeply intertwined and mutually constitutive. However, as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, among other Science Technology Studies scholars, have pointed out, technoscientific knowledge is situated knowledge. In the case of comfort, the recent discourse was primarily produced by researchers based in or originating from Europe and North America, and was wittingly or unwittingly shaped by their temperate norms and assumptions. Taught in architectural curricula and codified into building standards, the Euro-American-centric

TEI 2020 Pictorials (Feb 2020, Sydney, Australia)

Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction

Sydney, 9-12 February2020

Call for papers:

Contribution types

Authors are invited to submit high-quality papers (4-10 pages, not including references) that contribute to advancing this rapidly developing field through the following contribution types:

• Research – original, mature, and complete research in the field of TEI. Focus may be on developing and evaluating new technologies, techniques, and systems, user studies, modeling and simulation, reflective research-through-design studies, or rigorous theoretical analysis. Recommended paper length: 6-10 pages.
• Case study –  compelling stories based on concrete cases of research, design, and deployment that show how TEI concepts and methods can be applied and how they can be valuable in various contexts including (but not limited to) museums, education, health, homes, and smart environments. We invite contributions from practitioners and researchers.  Recommended paper length: 4-8 pages.
• Prototype – Demonstrable prototypes are front and center at the conference: these are artifacts that promote and provoke discussion of novel interactive technologies and design concepts. We invite contributions from research, industry, maker communities, the arts, and design communities. Prototypes could show (for example) interaction concepts, technologies, design toolkits, or new materials.  Recommended paper length: 4-6 pages. Submissions should include a video.

Respecting the diversity of approaches and methods that together make up TEI, each contribution type will be peer-reviewed on its own merits. We seek high-quality work regardless of the specific subdomain or topic and we expect the work to be positioned firmly in, and building on, prior research in our field, in particular, wherever relevant referencing work that was presented at earlier TEI conferences.

Accepted submissions of all contribution types will be included as papers in the conference proceedings, which will be available in the ACM Digital Library.

Call for Pictorials: 

General information

We are very pleased to announce a new Pictorials track for TEI2020. Pictorials were first introduced at DIS2014 with the aim of supporting the presentation and communication of research ideas, methods, provocations, insights, and contributions in a more visually rich format. Since then it has been successfully implemented in DIS and C&C conferences with an increasing interest from researchers and practitioners. We are very excited to offer this new track and welcome your submissions!

What are Pictorials?

Pictorials are papers in which the visual components (e.g. diagrams, sketches, illustrations, renderings, photographs, annotated photographs, and collages) play a major role in conveying the ideas and contributions of a study in addition to the accompanying text. Pictorials leverage the power of visual communication with the effective use of visual languages and high-quality images. They may have a practical or theoretical nature or both.

Through Pictorials, researchers, practitioners, industry professionals, artists, designers and students from various disciplines, including engineering, interaction design, computer science, product design, media studies and the arts are encouraged to express and unpack

European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes - Curating the city: artistic practices and urban transformations

The European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes, vol 3, no 1.

Edited by Annalisa Trentin, Anna Rosellini, Amir Djalali  |  Download a PDF version of this call.

Since the end of the 1970s, exhibitions, museums and artistic events have gained a central role in shaping the transformation of the city. Art, culture and knowledge have become the instruments through which cities have faced the crisis of industrial economy and the rise of new paradigms and values of urban development.

Art has a demonstrated impact in urban regeneration processes. While the presence of artists has been linked to the rise of the financial attractiveness of neighbourhoods, private and public museum institutions are leading actors in urban development, reclaiming former industrial sites and boosting land value in low-income neighbourhoods. At the same time, Biennials, Triennials, summer festivals, concerts and cultural events are seen by city administrators and planners as opportunities to promote investments in the city, attract capitals and visitors, and improving the image of the city.

Cultural events and initiatives are not only instruments in the hands of urban planners, but they are changing the way in which the city is planned and designed. Curatorial practices seem to have become the new paradigm for all the other disciplines traditionally involved in the transformation, design and construction of the city. Architecture and urban planning are more and more becoming curatorial activities, borrowing their methods from artistic and museum practices.

Urban planning is no longer made by systematic decisions and long-term strategies that take in consideration the entire city and its territory, but through occasional interventions in specific areas. Design is more and more the act of selecting, organizing and integrating existing elements, resources and ideas in temporary assemblages, avoiding the definition of

Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture - 'Collections' - September 2019

“Here, indeed, lies the whole miracle of collecting. For it is invariably oneself  that one collects.”[1]

“Perhaps the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion. Right from the start, the great collector is struck by the confusion, by the scatter, in which the things of the world are found.”[2]

The interior is a repository for collections, whether curated as a body of work for a museum or the personal possessions of an individual. Collections can be thematic, nostalgic, scientific, artificial and natural, ranging in scale from large to small, physical to ephemeral, critical or superfluous, from the obviously curated to seemingly random. Collections convey knowledge of heritage, culture, society and evolution, protecting specimens and objects of material culture for generations to view. They allow for comparison between objects and create relationships between them where there were none.  These can be viewed in large institutional museums that have not been without contention with works pilfered from original sites.  In juxtaposition, everyday objects are celebrated and curated in unexpected locations such as the MmuseumM housed in a converted elevator shaft.  As subject matter, collections can range from decorative to the obsessive, or challenge conventions to curatorial statements about truth and fiction as found in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.  The interior is the site for collections which are given a descriptive and physical framework through the lens of curators, exhibition designers, interior designers and architects who set the stage for objects and viewers.

Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture seeks submissions that address the topic of collections.  Submissions can take the form of essays, design work, visual collections, musings, alternative interpretations to collections, all the while situating them within the broader context of interiors.  Emphasis will be placed on non-traditional content in order to open up the opportunity for new insight on how collections are viewed and interpreted.

[1] Jean Baudrillard, “The Systems of Collecting”, in Cultures of Collecting edited by John Elsner, Roger Cardinal, (Reaktion Books, London, 1994) p.12.
[2] Walter Benjamin, “The Collector”, in The Arcades Project. (Harvard University Press, 1999) p. 211.

Phase 1: Note of Interest – 30 September 2019

Phase 2: Full Submissions – 1 March 1 2020

For more information see the Interiors call for papers site.