CfP // Re-Learning Design
Martin Tironi
From: Renato Bernasconi <rabern...@gmail.com>
Date: 2017-07-20 15:34 GMT-04:00
Subject: Re: DISEÑA 12 CfP Re-Learning Design
To: Martin Tironi <martin...@gmail.com>
CFP: Re-learning design
Pedagogic experiments with social and cultural theory
in design studio courses
Edited by Ignacio Farías & Tomás Sánchez Criado, MCTS, TU Munich
In the last decades, design disciplines have been entering into new collaborations with the social sciences and humanities. Going beyond the old-fashioned modernist division of labor–whereby designers would feel responsible for bringing solutions for the public good by shaping objects, technologies or spaces, with social scientists playing a role giving clues about their potential users and their issues–, these new collaborations involve rather radical redefinitions of the disciplines there involved.
Especially in the field of science and technology studies (STS), but also in anthropology, design has become a key trope to re-conceive the social, the precarious processes of composition of our collective worlds or ecologies, the articulation of agency and the performativity of knowledge, even leading to the proposition of an in-between discipline like “design anthropology” as a reconfiguration of the anthropological endeavor by means of design practices. Recent transformations of the notions of “matter” and “politics” that recent strands of social and cultural thought have been delving on might have made these experimental encounters possible.
At the same time, not just ethnographic research, but the conceptual work characteristic of these forms of social and cultural theory have significantly been incorporated in a series of on-going redefinitions of current design practices as going beyond business as usual or “problem-solving”. Indeed, many designers are increasingly describing their tasks as forms of problem-making, which involve reimagining design as a form of “critical making”, or as a set of “speculative”, “forensic”, “infrastructuring” and “agonistic” practices.
In this special issue, we are interested in exploring the shape such collaborations and intersections are taking in one specific space: the space of the design studio course, or, to be more specific, the pedagogic experiments taking place in them. We are interested in pedagogic experiments as controlled settings allowing designers to re-learn how to design: by incorporating design-attuned versions of contemporary social and cultural theory in interventions that entail putting the politico-material, agential, and ecologic affordances of design to a radical test. Re-learning design thus describes the practice and its effect: design through re-learning, a re-learning to explore other ways of designing.
In continuity with this, we are interested in papers addressing one or various of the following issues:
• How are social science concepts and modes of research re-specified in practices of design conceptualization or research?
• How does the brief or research question shaping design studio courses need to be adapted in order to integrate these conceptual concerns?
• How is the social science practice of reading highly conceptual texts brought together with processes of materialization or making in the design studio course? What are the issues, difficulties and problems usually being faced?
• In which institutional settings are such experiments possible and feasible?
• To what extent these experimentations might be prototyping a different form of professional practice for designers?
Ideally, we expect authors to submit manuscripts describing and reflecting on one or two concrete examples of studio courses in design or architecture schools. We encourage authors to not just stress the experimental arrangements developed to bring in conceptual sensibilities into a design course, but also to reflect on the various ways of failing to engage students in this form of experimental practice.
If interested, please submit your manuscript to p...@mcts.tum.de in either Spanish or English by September 30, 2017. Revisions and modifications after the peer-review process need to occur during November 2017, as the issue will come out in December 2017.
The length of the manuscripts will be from 3,500 to 4,000 words and should include figures and images illustrating the argument.
Authors must also provide an abstract (140 words max.) and five keywords, as well as a short 150 words bio. Citations and list of references must follow APA style.
Please, see instructions for authors attached.
Escuela de Diseño
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Proyecto de Investigación: TheSmartCitizenProject.cl
Publicaciones
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tel. + 56 2 23545689