Deadline for submissions extended to November 11, 2021!

More information of the Call for Authors available here.

Authors must submit an extended abstract through the form in this link.
Download the Call PDF here.

Temes de Disseny is a design research journal by Cumulus member, Elisava, Barcelona School of Design and Engineering. Temes de Disseny (Topics on Design, hereinafter TdD, in its Catalan acronym) started in 1986 as one of the first design local journals. It was created with the goal of being a knowledge transfer channel between design professionals, pedagogues and scholars. TdD aims to bring together knowledge generated by experts from multiple disciplines, who study design from distinct points of view. Each journal edition intends to approach specific topics related to design, such as: design methodologies; innovation through design; indoor spaces and objects shapes; transmedia and macro- trends; design, food and health; visual communication or industrial design, among others.
The 34th issue of the journal was the first step towards transforming TdD in an open access, peer reviewed, indexed journal that locals and foreign designers can use to share their knowledge at an
international level.

Yo Habito: Yo Transito. Rita de Rivera. Elisava Degree in Design Final Project, 2021. Photo by Pau Martínez.

Relate North 2021: Everyday Extremes is the title for the 9th Annual Symposium & Exhibition

Deadline for submissions of artwork proposals and/or abstracts: August 30, 2021

You are invited to submit artworks and/or an abstract for the virtual symposium and exhibition “Relate North 2021: Everyday Extremes”.

The event is a collaboration between the UArctic Thematic Network on Arctic Sustainable Arts and Design (ASAD), National Research Tomsk State University, and University of Lapland. This will be the ninth symposium in the series hosted by ASAD. The ASAD network aims to identify and share innovative practices in learning, teaching, research and knowledge exchange in the fields of art, design and visual culture education.

The network promotes cooperation and collaboration between academic institutions and communities with the purpose of working towards a shared understanding of critical issues relevant to people living in the north.

Please see the Call and application form for more information.

For more infomation visit the ASAD website.

The program has been conceived as a shared space between researchers from various disciplines (design, architecture, art, digital culture, computer engineering, social and human sciences,
philosophy). In this sense, intertwining is understood here as an ontological premise and an epistemological necessity. For this reason, articles and research projects that include different points of view from other disciplinary frontiers are welcome for this Call.

Topics include, but are not limited to:
– Socio-techno-natural entanglements caused or magnified by the pandemic, with its risks and yet opportunities, especially for design;
– Opportunities (and limits) of digital fabrication, maker design, emerging forms of collaborative design, and open-source as ways to address the health crisis;
– Risks and opportunities in the forms now prevalent in educational environments, both physical and virtual, shaken by the phenomenon of telecommunication;
– Issues relating to space: blurring of public/private boundaries, online/offline hybridization, emerging forms of control and security in urban space;
– Issues related to the body: social distancing, new proxemics, emerging forms of biopower;
– New modes of research, creation, and dissemination in art and design-driven or magnified by the health crisis;
– Visual communication: ways of narrating the pandemic;
– Issues related to data-based technologies: algorithmic governance, uses of artificial intelligence for the construction of pandemic narratives, and the (bio)political management of the current crisis.

The Submission deadline is September 13, 2021. This issue will be published in December 2021. Find out more about the call here.

Inmaterial is a scientific journal aimed at researchers, professionals, and teachers who deal with design in its different theoretical and practical aspects. The purpose of this journal coordinated by BAU, Centro Universitario de Diseño, is to overcome traditional disciplinary boundaries and make its reflections available for as broad a public as possible. Contact at info.inmaterialdesign@bau.cat

The team behind the call “Building the Future” wants to declare that the gestures of the lifeguards as well as all the gestures of hospitality, care, benevolence, friendship, joy that are deployed on the path of migrants, are of a priceless beauty and significance. This is why the call is
conducted upon the request to UNESCO aiming to inscribe them on the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

To take part in this call and clarify its content with us, please send us an email before the end of June 2021 to:
contact@perou-paris.org. Please see the Building the future PDF for more information on the call.

More information in English: Building the future

More information in French: Construire l’avenir

More information in Spanish: Construir el futuro

The individual actors behind this call are VPLPdesign, Civic City, Atelier Marc Ferrand, Charlotte Cauwer, Marielle Macé and PEROU Paris.

illustrations: sketches for a ship for the Mediterranean Sea, VPLPdesign, April 2021

The Cumulus Conference Guayaquil 2021: Arts imagining communities to come seeks to promote academic reflections and artistic performances focusing on different ways of working with local communities. The conference would like to invite artists, scholars, professors, and researchers to share their experiences and reflections on this matter, pre, during and after the pandemic. Research tracks can be found below. Please consider the proposals can be submitted as theoretical, performative and/or document-artistic presentations that contribute to address the questions below.

For UArtes is important to focus on inter-learning experiences that connect communities over outreach programmes and projects. We create community projects that, through arts education, enable collective construction of knowledge, encourage know-how exchanges, and promote participation for social transformation.

In our outreach programs we seek, from the arts perspective, to provide solutions to: interculturality, gender and diversity, memory, ancestral languages, public space, cultural rights, inclusion or identity and environmental related problems. To do so, UArtes works with priority targeted groups particularly: children and adolescents, indigenous populations and nationalities, people affected by violence, people with disabilities, migrant populations, communities sitting on defenceless territories, and people deprived of liberty. We build working networks with government institutions, educational system establishments, community, and international cooperation organisations. These projects have resulted in an outstanding creative production in/from/with the communities themselves, which fortify the sense of public education in the arts as a right.

TRACKS

Track 1: Crisis, criticism, and creation

Our present has emerged as a time of crises: economic, geopolitical, epistemological, sanitarian, and climate. Such crises are so dramatically intertwined that it becomes difficult to imagine concrete alternatives. However, a crisis is not the end of the world, but rather an opportunity to critically reflect on it and the genealogy that has led us to our current state. And, because the best defence is a good offense, criticism, therefore, should be first of all a way of rethinking and redesigning the Age in which we live, radically changing our point of view and our outlook with respect to the future. If design is intended to make visible the invisible, to design the future is to make visible what will happen after the crisis, creating the social and cultural conditions for its completion. In this sense, it is particularly important to identify those crucial agents or issues that could be addressed in order to begin the process of re-imagining the world. We ask, then, starting from a local perspective, is it possible to establish the South as a strategical place of enunciation to reconcile critical analysis of the present with acts of creation? Which social experiences, artistic practices and activist projects seem to embody, within the crisis, this effort? Which theoretical and artistic trajectories are committed to a counter-hegemonic critique of the present that could also be considered a creation?

Keywords: Global crisis, counter-hegemony, design thinking, social engagement in arts, imagination-creation.

Track 2: Production Design in the Arts

In a global atmosphere oscillating between confinement and fears of new COVID-19 outbreaks, an emphasis has been drawn on the aestheticized and fictional forms of products exhibited and distributed on social media and digital platforms. However, in the face of the permanent presence of virtuality, the doubt arises about whether the use of technological tools traversing artistic production diffuses the breach between art buffs, emergent artists, and professionals. This problem remarks the way friendly and open software, apps or interfaces resolved the needs of creators once they reach technological competences in artistic design, reflection and composition.

Since creative processes’ times and freedoms have been altered as a result of the lack of physical exchanging and conviviality, our challenge is to project ourselves towards a sustainable popular economy or a self-income generation model through fairs, garage sales or auctions, amongst other actions/strategies, that could result in partnership affiliation and cooperative movement, that could enable regional networks activation.
This call invites DJs; artistic producers; sound, stage or animation designers; and visual artists in general to share their archives and proposals in regard to self-publishing, understanding of algorithms, marketing logics in order to position an inclusive brand that, in some occasions, turns out even profitable thanks to the support of endorsers that legitimize inside a complex and saturated market.

Key words: DJ, transdisciplinary design, rent, influencers, co-creation, digital strategies.

Track 3: Art, nature, biology and technology

If the decade beginning in 2010 can be thought as the crucial period of smartification, of social media dominance, and the awareness of the Anthropocene-Capitalocene, then 2020 and the pandemic has in turn obligated us to reorient our attention towards biology and its direct effects on our physical health. At the same time, technology has totally reconfigured our social and individual environment. We live in a new era of the screens or, as Naomi Klein defines it in “Screen New Deal”. During quarantine and the forced lockdown caused by the sanitary emergency, we came towards a social and painful atomization; we are still far from comprehending its long-term effects, but it immediately makes us more aware than ever before of a simultaneously yearned-for and avoided otherness. In this framework, the arts and design are driven to rethink the relations between technology, the environment and biology. In this context of a Damaged Planet (Haraway), the ambition of passing from the expression of one’s own cosmovision and the self, to the concrete design of a pluriversal (McKenzie, Mignolo), multi-specific (Margulis) and perspectivist (Viveiros de Castro) world becomes strategic. In this respect, and given that it would be a political error to reduce the role of the arts merely to its aesthetic dimension, we find ourselves moving towards a great cosmopolitical question: How should we think bioethically and biopolitically about the relations between life/lives, technologies and creation? Besides, and turning back to more general aspects, we ask ourselves what sense is there in making art in a «Damaged Planet»? How should we handle, politically and artistically, the possibilities of designing worlds provided by the digital, while, at the same time, fighting against its totalitarian tendencies of control? Which opportunities for a world to come arise from artistic practices, Latin American “artivism” and the epistemologies of the Global South?

Key words: Smartification, World design and worlding, cosmopolitics, artivism, southern epistemologies.

Track 4: Urban art and redesigning cities

For several decades, the urban landscape has become a territory of disputes and a place for the articulation of relationships which range from the political and emotional to the aesthetic. To this extent, the resonance of creative expressions on the streets are ever more deserving of a profound and careful analysis. In this sense, visual phenomena like the ‘Ganchos’ from Monterrey, the ‘Pichação’ in Sao Paulo and the ‘Chapeteo’ in Guayaquil Ecuador, amongst others, provide proof of organic and regional cultural processes that, albeit stemming from the Bronxs’ boom in New York (Castleman), configure a regional graffiti typology, framed within a specific socio-political context.

Taking into account the current state of urban design and how this has impacted on the way art is produced, it is now relevant to review the ways in which this intervention has impacted on the production; this includes amongst others graffiti and urban art as part of the contemporary repertoire shown on street walls.

Graffiti is an unstoppable cultural process that maintains an open and direct dialogue with the physical and social architecture of its territories. It presents itself as a strategy and methodology for diverse processes of creative exploration. Different types of graffiti such as; ‘Caligraffiti’, ‘Laser Tag’, ‘Led Throwie’ and ‘Electrograf’ are the result of these primary inquiries, which include the use of new technologies.

Therefore, we must ask ourselves, to what extent is design inserted into these forms of creative production? To what extent are urban art and graffiti configured as a space for graphic resistance? To what extent are they a means of exploration of new ways of creative intervention in the urban landscape?

Key words: Urban art, city, public space, laser tag, graffiti, design

Read the whole text of the call and submission details at the conference website: http://cumulusguayaquil2021.org

Extended Programme: 25th June – 3rd July 2022
Main Conference: 27th June – 1st July 2022

We are living through extraordinary times where design in many forms is necessary to counter the enormous problems we face in the challenges of our coexistence.

How has the discipline of design research responded? Can design and design research bring the insights and methods needed for transformation and collaboration?
Join us at the Guggenheim in Bilbao for DRS2022, a hybrid conference with unique participation opportunities and a showcase for the best in design research. Whatever your orientation to design research we encourage you to participate, to show the true diversity and potential of our discipline.

DRS2022 is hosted by the city of Bilbao, in Northwest Spain, in association with the University of the Basque Country (Universidad del País Vasco) and the wider ecosystem of local academic and design institutions. In 2014 Bilbao became a member of the UNESCO City of Design network. As such, it hosts a permanent Design and Creativity Council with a mission to promote design-oriented urban policies and to integrate goals related to the cultural and creative industries into local development plans. Bilbao recently joined the Global Destination Sustainability Index with a commitment to meet specific guidelines for the development of more sustainable conferences.
DRS2022 is also hosted online in a hybrid mode, with opportunities for new interactions between the place-based and online conferences. The extended conference format will give you the chance to experience the energy and creativity of Bilbao wherever you choose to participate from.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Participation for DRS2022 takes a number of different formats. Theme Tracks aim to capitalize on emerging and specialized research networks. Research Papers can be submitted to an open call or theme-track. Conversation Sessions provide an opportunity for structured discussion exploring emerging themes. Workshops provide practical experience of methods and research outcomes, and Labs offer an opportunity to conduct design research through engagement with local organisations. A PhD Researcher event will help develop the next generation of design researchers through building new capabilities and critical thinking.

RESEARCH PAPERS
DRS2022 invites new paper submissions in an open call or theme-track. We embrace research looking at and using design in the widest possible sense, with interdisciplinary work particularly encouraged. Further details about theme-tracks will be announced in due course.
Submission is for full papers only up to 5000 words, including abstracts and references, and should adhere to the conference paper submission guidelines, available in August on the conference website. All submissions must be in the English language.
Authors of accepted papers are required to register and present their work at the conference, either physically or virtually according to the hybrid nature of the event. All accepted papers will be published in the DRS Digital Library and available to view approximately one month before the beginning of the conference.
Paper submission system will be open from 1st September 2021 and full papers must be submitted by 15th November 2021.

Read the whole announcement.

TIMETABLE TO DRS2022
Deadline for theme-track session proposals: 26th July 2021
Deadline for full papers: 15th November 2021
Notification of accepted papers: February 2022
Deadline for Conversations, Workshops, Labs: February 2022
Conference Dates: 25th June – 3rd July 2022

CONTACT
Any queries about the conference should be directed to: admin@drs2022.org
Conference website: https://www.drs2022.org (not yet live!)
For regular updates follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/drs2022 (not yet live!)

The Design Research Society is a multi-disciplinary learned society for the design research community worldwide. You can visit the DRS website at: http://www.designresearchsociety.org

**
DRS is an official partner of Cumulus.

Service Design with the Planet in Mind is the feature theme of the upcoming issue of Touchpoint – The Journal of Service Design. We are looking to publish articles that explore question such as how are service designers embedding sustainability concerns into their decision-making? How are we supporting the so-called circular economy? And what can we learn from the natural sciences and from nature in order to improve our own activities?

Read more and submit your abstracts via the online form until 10 June 2021 (23:59 CET).

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SDN is a partner of Cumulus.

Mirroring communities through Art and Design
Dates: 30 Nov – 3 Dec 2021
University of Lapland, Finland

Conference theme

Central to the conference is a core question: ‘What might a model or methods of ‘mirroring’ mean and become through its development and application through art and design research?’. We hope to encounter a variety of ways that participants and contributors can demonstrate diverse and wide-ranging uses of this idea which will help reveal the potential for further possible practices of mirroring. We also look forward to opportunities for discussion and the development of the mirroring concept as a way to establish spaces and build bridges for dialogue, conversation and collaboration among global youth when it is applied across geographical distances. We are keen to explore how mirroring might be further used as a potent political tool across the arts and in terms of design so that it can help inspire or influence social movements. We also hope to encourage innovations which explore how care, responsibilities and relationships might become central to our ways of approaching and utilizing mirroring in the contexts of arts-based and design methods.

The concept of mirroring has much to offer in terms of how it can be utilized within and outside of individual academic contexts or disciplines. It allows us to recognize or acknowledge empathy, intersubjectivity and understanding in our own actions, and in those of others (Zahavi 2012). Neurologically, the large scale networks and mirroring mechanisms in the human brain create the basis for a social mirroring (Iacoboni 2007) while also contributing to motion, emotion and empathy which create the aesthetic experience (Freedberg & Gallese 2007).

Interpersonally, mirroring can embody action which, when used as movement in performance or dance, can create emotional understanding and empathy for others (McGarry & Russo 2011). We can also see instances of mirroring in structural and organized social relations through our interactions or correspondences as members of a community, and through society and culture. Indeed, since mirroring acts upon social perception multidimensionally, its potential can expand beyond straightforward comparison (Hřebíčková, Graf, Tegdes & Brezina 2017).

Mirroring, therefore, can contribute to achieving social empathy and an understanding of others (Segal 2018), and can be practiced as part of a variety of tacit social interactions (Hasson & Frith 2016). Further, through acts and actions which work to mirror our own views, values and ideas with those of others we are able to learn socially. Such a pluralistic and heterogeneous approach, we believe, will promise and contribute more to creative processes and solutions than if we continue to remain fixed upon homogeneity and the limitations of ‘singularism’ (Wals 2010).

Call for contributions – papers, posters and visual essays
We welcome proposals for contributions across a variety of formats, including:

1. Long (academic) paper – 2000–3500 words
2. Short (report) paper – 500–1500 words
3. Visual contributions (posters, visual essays etc.)

Your conference proposal might include (but is not limited to) any of the following themes or applications of the mirroring concept:

•mirror(ing) as reflection
•mirroring as representation
•mirroring as positioning
•mirroring as protection
•mirroring as knowing
•mirroring as showing & seeing & (multi)sensing & feeling
•mirroring as spying/playing
•mirroring as solidarity
•mirroring as care
•mirroring as a portal or entrance (to another world?)
•mirroring as history and future
•mirroring as learning, unlearning and relearning
•mirroring as visual practice

We are also excited to receive proposals for contributions which seek to explore the opportunities for developing visually-led narratives (posters, visual essays, short films etc.) which make use of modes of critical enquiry and storytelling as a means to explore ideas of mirroring.

Please send your submission to seeyouth@ulapland.fi.

Deadline for submission of abstracts 6.6.2021

Read the full call

diid is a scientific journal aimed at researchers, professionals, and scholars who deal with design and the debate on cultures that design embodies. diid is looking for articles about design and design cultures and their correlation with sustainability issues, technologies, society and human behaviors.

The submission deadline for diid No.74 is June 30, 2021.

See here for more information on the call.

The conference will take place in Hong Kong at the School of Design of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University on 5–9 December on the theme of [ ] With Design.

Under the theme of [ _ ] WITH DESIGN: REINVENTING DESIGN MODES, design finds itself at a critical moment where the conventional ‘modes’ of doing, thinking and application are increasingly challenged by the troubled ideology of globalization, climate changes, migration patterns and rapid restructuring of locally driven manufacturing sectors. In addition, the wider call for design to become more open and more cross- and trans-disciplinary has further blurred boundaries between disciplinary and knowledge domains, challenging both design discourses and designers to steer praxis and thinking across unchartered territory for the sake of innovation and advancing research.  In combination with the environmental, cultural, technological, and, crucially, pandemic transitions, the call heeds for design at large to fundamentally alter its modes of practice. Beyond the conventional models of conducting research, or developing solutions to ‘wicked’ problems, the recoupling of design with different modes should be seen as an expression to embrace other capacities of thinking, criticisms and productions. The coupling of SOCIAL, MAKING, BUSINESS, CRITICAL, HISTORICAL/PROJECTIVE, IMPACT, PANDEMIC and ALTERNATIVE MODES with DESIGN necessitates the rescripting of all aptitudes and practices.

[ _ ] WITH DESIGN: REINVENTING DESIGN MODES encourages design researchers to discuss, elaborate and investigate emerging modes of design research that transcend disciplines in order to serve a multitude of goals and scales. This overarching theme wishes to solicit the definition of new frameworks, models, methods, products and unexpected outcomes in this questioning of design futures.