[MaFLa] Design Culture and Somaesthetics - May 6-8 2019 BUDAPEST

[Alexander Kremer]

*Design Culture and Somaesthetics *Conference in dialogue between
post-disciplinary fields

Conference Date: *06-08. 05. 2019.*
Conference Venue: Moholy-Nagy University of Art&Design, Budapest
Conference Hosted by: Design Culture Studies Doctoral Program at the
Doctoral School of Moholy-Nagy University of Art&Design, Budapest &
Hungarian Forum of Somaesthetics

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.



*Call for Papers*

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=en

Or submit your proposal (in no more than 300 words with 5 keywords) of a
20-30 minutes presentation to: conference2019 at mome.hu

*DEADLINE OF SUBMISSION: 15.02.2019*
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