A Design Studies Symposium
Presented by Parsons The New School for Design
with Carnegie Mellon University
Register now at http://designstudies.wix.com/symposium
Friday, April 10, 1:30 pm to 5:00 pm // Saturday, April 11, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Parsons – Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Avenue
Free and open to the public
A Design Studies Symposium
For something to matter in the way we live, it needs to be made with the understanding that, in ways both good and ill, artifacts have an enormous affect on individual behaviors as well as the behaviors of social and environment exacerbates. Design’s role in this process has often been to condition behaviors through things, whether by using seat belts to save lives or purchasing low-energy light bulbs to save energy. In encouraging people to delegate decisions via design, we recognize the agency of intentional things. However, we also reinforce passivity. In allowing artifacts to determine what bodies can and cannot do, design can unwittingly reify social and political constraints.
This symposium will look at various responses from designers whose approaches afford agency by opening up choices instead of shutting them down. This symposium will look at how design—in light of distributed cognition, actor network theory, and theories of material intelligence—is expanding its purview to reflect reciprocity in the actions of people and things, and the places they continually reconfigure.
