Cfp 4S-EASST Open Panel: Times of design

[Ana Delgado]

Dear colleagues, 

We are organising an open panel for the coming EASST/4S meeting that will take place in Copenhagen. This is a panel on design and its temporalities with an especial -but not exclusive- focus on digital design practices (see abstract below). If you are considering to submit a paper to this session but you would like to know more about it, please email me ana.d...@svt.uib.no

Times of design

In a number of emerging fields, the turn towards design and particularly digital design practices can be seen as influencing new ontologies and epistemologies: the human body, the Earth and the skies and life itself are becoming matters of design as technoscientific fields such as synthetic biology, geoegineering and converging technologies for the enhancement of the human body develop digital methods and approaches. There is a need within STS to critically cope with those developments, and looking at the temporalities that organise design practices is one of them. This panel session will explore the temporalities implicit in design practices, particularly the orientation towards the future that informs computer based design practices. Aims to be ahead of oneself, to control and appropriate futures, have been central to the development of modern science and technology. The digital turn and the emphasis on design in science and technology displaces and takes such tendencies further. For instance, while biologists and geographers have aimed at producing accurate representations of the entities they study, practices of digital design focus on how systems change and evolve overtime aiming to fabricate systems in controlled and desired ways. Because of its changing properties, life itself and the atmosphere appear for synthetic biologists and geoengineers as versatile materials for design. Designs within emerging technosciences not only aim at predicting futures but also at shaping them. In this panel we invite participants to explore the temporalities intrinsic to practices of design and particularly, digital design. We especially invite a focus on how different temporalities are produced within different technoscientific practices and modes of representation, and how these temporalities in turn are (re-) reproduced through digital designs.

See: http://www.4sonline.org/files/open_panels_12.pdf; http://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s12/. Submission deadline is 11th March.

Organizers: Ana Delgado, Roger Strand and Dorothy Dankel. 

Ana Delgado

Post doctoral fellow
Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities
University of Bergen
PO Box 7800, N-5020
Bergen, Norway
Phone: +4755582705
ana.d...@svt.uib.no