EASST_010 had three tracks dealing with intersections between STS and Design. Carl DiSalvo, Alex Wilkie and I convened a track titled “Speculation, Design, Public and Participatory Technoscience: Possibilities and Critical Perspectives“, which complimented a track from Julian McHardy, Trevor Pinch and Nina Wakeford under the theme of “Design, Performativity, STS“, and a third design track titled ” What objects do: design, consumption and social practices“.

EASST was fairly massive, with 41 tracks in all, comprising over 800 papers, so is was great to have and opportunity to get together on Saturday and chat with others curious about STS and Design, in an impromptu session devised by Lucy Kimble and Nina Wakeford.

Here’s a pdf of papers in our track, and here’s a set of abstracts. Those papers were:

Tursday September 2
Session 1: 13.30-15.30 Networks of Engagement & Pedagogy
Designing Public Engagement with Science: Citizens, Idiots, Parasites – Mike Michael
Speculative design and the issue of public participation – Emily Dawson
Circulating speculative design – public engagement and practitioner promotion – Tobie Kerridge
Chasing the Carrot or The Not-Implications of STS for Design – Katharina Bredies
Experimental Processes – A Study of Design for ‘Future Digital Manners’ – Ann-Christina Lange

Session 2: 16.00-18.00 Construction of Users & Publics
Enacting Users, Mediating Publics – Alex Wilkie & Andy Boucher
Democratising technology and innovation: the role of the “participant” in Living Labs – Wouter Mensink, Benoît Dutilleul, Frans A.J. Birrer
Combining engineering design and STS: designing technology and society – Hanneke Miedema
Performing future waste practices in a shopping center – Joachim Halse
The Agency of Design in the Innovation Process – Diego Compagna

Friday September 3
Session 3: 9.00-11.00 Events and Materiality (5)
Attending to the Media and Materiality of the Objects of Speculative Design – Carl DiSalvo
Communication-Mediated Computation: The ‘Hmmm’ Environment as an engine for Participatory Speculative Design – Nathaniel Savery
Speculative design by practice: A robot case study – James Auger, Laurel Swan, Alex S. Taylor
Ambivalent Animal – Geoffrey Thomas
Artifacts from the future of domestic living: Engaging innovation by means of speculative design – a preliminary investigation – Tau Ulv Lenskjold

I gave a paper about Designing Debate, which was a reflection on what designers might mean by debate, particularly when their practice gets entangled with upstream forms of public engagement with science and technology. The session I contributed to was kicked off by Mike Michael who framed Stenger’s discussion of the idiot in the context of speculative design and public engagement. My paper was followed by Emily Dawson’s reflection on the kinds of publics who are indeed engaged by speculative design. So there was a fair amount of discussion of Material Beliefs here, and Biojewellery, which was fascinating to see. Here’s the transcript for my paper.

Above: Closing plenary session with Amade M’charek and Mike Michael

MAKING AND OPENING: ENTANGLING DESIGN AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
24TH SEPTEMBER 2010, 9.00 – 17:30

BEN PIMLOTT BUILDING – LECTURE THEATRE GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

HOW MIGHT DESIGN AND SOCIAL SCIENCE SPEAK TO EACH OTHER’S PRACTICES? HOW MIGHT SOCIAL SCIENCE AND DESIGN REMAKE ONE ANOTHER’S OBJECTS?

SPEAKERS INCLUDE: PELLE EHN, BILL GAVER, MIKE MICHAEL, BILL MOGGRIDGE, HARVEY MOLOTCH, MICHELLE MURPHY, LUCY SUCHMAN, NINA WAKEFORD.

EXPLORING INNOVATIVE WAYS OF FURTHER ENTANGLING DESIGN AND SOCIAL SCIENCE DISCIPLINES THROUGH A RANGE OF OPEN ISSUES: SPECULATION/ANTICIPATION; PARTICIPATION/IMPACT; DISCIPLINE/CONTAMINATION; MAKING/METHOD.

THIS CONFERENCE IS LIMITED TO 60 DELEGATES.
TO REGISTER, PLEASE CONTACT: SOCIOLOGY@GOLD.AC.UK.
£15.00 FULL PRICE | £10.00 CONCESSIONS

SPONSORED BY: CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF INVENTION AND SOCIAL PROCESS, INTERACTION RESEARCH STUDIO, INCUBATOR FOR CRITICAL INQUIRY INTO TECHNOLOGY AND ETHNOGRAPHY, DEPARTMENT OF DESIGN, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY.

[download pdf poster]

The Neuroscope is featured in Designofotherthings a group exhibition at the Triennale Design Museum from 26 May – 27 June 10. The show is part of La Triennale di Milano.

TransNatural is a programme of events taking place in Amsterdam from 19th February – 19th March 2010, including an exhibition, a symposium and workshops. Here’s some description from the event website:

Technology was the means by which we separated ourselves from nature, and escaped its limitations. In the 21st century we move beyond the animosity between nature and technology. In a lot of areas we see new fruitful collaborations and new kinds of unity: in our dealings with the environment en with energy, but also in arts, architecture, fashion and games… What will this transnatural world look like? Is this a next evolutionary step, or merely a changed perception of ourselves?

On Saturday 13th I’ll be presenting Material Beliefs as a part of the symposium, along with Rachel Armstrong, Jan Jongert, Elio Caccavale and Koert van Mensvoort. A focus for me will be a less separated view of technical and natural objects. In an account of speculative design, I’ll show how bodies, technologies, research issues, labs and materials are brought together as an open-ended form of public engagement of science and technology.

The programme is put together by Multiplex, including production by Arjen Bangma and Sanne de Rooij, and curarion by Klaas Kuitenbrouwer.

This evenings design and social sciences seminar is the last in this years series, and will feature contributions from Kat Jungnickel, Jennifer Gabrys and Joe Malia. Here we bring together a range of objects that relate to the theme of the seminar series, which is of course the shared Objects of Design and Social Science.

Kat is talking about an exhibition of her PhD work, that “explored the innovative practices of suburban technology (wifi and bike) makers operating on the fringes of established centres of innovation”. Jennifer’s object is dirt, a “mutable, fuzzy and messy object”, and Joe starts with a project using beads, that has been recently developed into an interdisciplinary research project.

We start at 4pm and finish with some refreshments in the studio at 6pm. Documentation of the event will be available shortly here.

Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots have been nominated for the TRANSMEDIALE AWARD 2010 from a pool of over 1500 entrants. CDER are being shown at transmediale.10 along with other nominees, as part of the festival programme.

The theme for this years festival is FUTURITY NOW! and event literature leads with a quote from William Gibson; ‘The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet’. As in previous years, the main body of the festival programme takes place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, with off-shoots all over Berlin.

The festival runs from the 2nd to the 7th of February, and the winners of the TRANSMEDIALE AWARD 2010 will be announced on Saturday 6th in the auditorium of HKV.

what happens if … ? is an exhibition at the Storey Gallery in Lancaster. It opened on 30th January and runs until 3rd Aprill 2010. Material Beliefs is there, in the form of Auger-Loizeau’s Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots, along with work by Roman Signer, Thomas Thwaites and others. Here’s some background:

This exhibition is about experimentation and play. It brings together artists with long-established international reputations, alongside recent graduates. What they have in common is a mischievous curiousity about the world around us, and a do-it-yourself approach. They conduct witty low-tech experiments to uncover the enchantment hidden within everyday utilitarian objects.

The address of the venue is Storey Gallery, Storey Creative Industries Centre, Meeting House Lane, Lancaster, LA1 1TH. Here’s some background to the gallery, which has a Facebook page here, and is directed by John Angus with events produced by Suzy Jones.

We invite you to submit an abstract to the track Speculation, Design, Public and Participatory Technoscience: Possibilities and Critical Perspectives at EASST 2010 in Trento, Italy, 2-4 September 2010.

Over the past decade there has been an increasing engagement between design and STS. One emerging and novel area of exchange is concerned with exploring the ways in which practices of ‘speculative design’ and STS concerns of publics, participation, politics as well as expectations come together to inform one another, to critique one another, and to collaborate in developing new modes of co-production of contemporary technoscience. Although such associations are promising, they are nascent and in need of articulation and critical examination.

For this track we are soliciting participation from STS scholars, design researchers and practicing designers. Our objective is to present a range of scholarly approaches and exemplary projects in order to critically explore the practices of Speculative Design.

The deadline for abstract submissions is 15 March, 2010.

Submission instructions are available online at: http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010/abstract-submission

About EASST:
The EASST_010 conference is the biennial forum of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) for contributions on topics from the range of disciplines found within science, technology and innovation studies. The particular focus for the 2010 conference is that of practice and performance. Science and technology, are seen as performative domains of the “social”, situated practices rooted and grown in a sociomaterial context.

More About the track ‘Speculation, Design, Public and Participatory Technoscience: Possibilities and Critical Perspectives’
By speculative design we refer to a set of design practices and outcomes that are moving away from common notions of design as “problem-solving” or “styling”, towards framing design as a means for surfacing and materialising issues and contributing to the formation of publics and futures. In this move, design is increasingly cast as a possible mode of intervention into technoscience, thereby establishing renewed associations with STS. With speculative design the performativity of the object comes to the fore as a concern for both designers and theorists, as its objects and outcomes are often brought into being to, and interpreted as, materially and discursively enacting values, identities, agendas and beliefs. A challenge for STS then is to describe and characterise the performativity of the objects of speculative design in new ways that avoid recourse to the familiar positions and debates concerning ‘the political of artefacts’.’

For this track we are solicit participation from STS scholars, design researchers and practicing designers. Our objective is to present a range of scholarly approaches and exemplary projects in order to explore and outline this field of convergence. Within the track, presentations will be organised thematically.

Key questions we hope to address include the following:

- How does a convergence of STS and speculative design reframe the notion of intervention?
- How does the convergence of STS and speculative design perform issues of politics and the political?
- How does speculative design operate to articulate issues, and what are its limitations in these endeavours?
- What kind of futures and expectations are performed in the doing of speculative design?
- How can we understand novel objects and materiality as forms of engagement and involvement?
- What are working strategies for supporting this convergence of STS and ‘speculative’ design?
- What are the limitations of STS methodologies in contributing to the design process and analysing the objects of design?
- What are limitations of design practice and methods to seriously taking up STS concepts and methodologies?

Regards,

Carl DiSalvo, Georgia Institute of Technology
Alex Wilkie, Goldsmiths, University of London
Tobie Kerridge, Goldsmiths, University of London

Multiple Ways to Design Research was the fifth symposium of the Swiss Design Network, convened at Lugano in Switzerland. The programme is online, to be followed shortly with the proceedings and video of the presented papers. Here’s a description of the theme:

The framework of the conference is based on the assumption that the evolution of sciences and technologies, and their impact on society, suggests new research questions that constantly tend to expand the ways to design research – in term of topics of interests, approaches and contaminations – research questions that can be relevant for the design knowledge, practice and education.

I spoke about Material Beliefs in terms of its contribution to public engagement of science and technology (a pdf of the full paper is available here) in a session with Björn Franke and Françoise Adler entitled “SENSE AND MEANING”. I also had a chance to hear from Pelle Ehnand Giovanni Anceschi.

The symposium was convened and hosted by Massimo Botta and Polly Bertram from the Laboratorio Cultura Visiva at SUPSI.

Cinema Corso, venue for Multiple Ways plenary sessions (image from Multiple Ways page)

The British Interactive Group are having their annual BIG event on 22-24 July at the Royal Institution, London. Material Beliefs is helping with as session called “Creativity, Collaboration and Science Communication”, where I’ll be joining Claire Rocks (who’ll be presenting Heart Robot), Emily Dawson and Sarah Jenkins.

A full schedule is available here, and the event is being blogged here.

Noel Jackson opening BIG Event 2009 (image from Jonathan S blog)