Call for papers
Designing for Bodies: Practices, Imaginaries and Discourses
Interdisciplinary Conference
February 6-7, 2025
Kolding, Denmark
https://event.sdu.dk/designingforbodies2025/conference
Deadline for submission of long abstracts: November 1, 2024
The objective of the conference is to explore design as a somatic expertise: How do designed things and design practices address users’ bodies? How is the body conceived and conceptualized, in a contemporary as well as historical perspective, as a central, formative element of design practice and design culture?
To explore this question, we invite you to the international academic conference, Designing for Bodies: Practices, Imaginaries and Discourses. We welcome scientific contributions in the form of papers, as well as technical demos, performances and interventions, from an interdisciplinary perspective that welcomes design and HCI research, design history and design culture, and STS, among others. Selected papers will be published in an edited volume.
The conference will take place in Kolding, Denmark in 6-7 February 2025, preceded by a PhD course on 5 February. It is hosted by the Design Culture research group at the Department of Design, Media and Educational Science, University of Southern Denmark. Both the conference and the book are funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, Semper Ardens: Accelerate Program, grant number CF21-0231.
THEME: DESIGN AS AN EXPERTISE OF THE BODY
Design practices across the 20th century were characterised by a search for a fit between designed things and their potential users’ characteristics through anthropometrics, usability and lifestyling. The turn of the century saw the rise to dominance of the concept of user experience and the prevalence of themes of care and well-being across design disciplines. Enabled by developments in ICT that quantify, codify and monitor user behaviour, design researchers and practitioners have developed “embodied” methods and approaches to better capture and shape experiences. All in all, designers seem to have become experts of human bodies and well-being; so that they can be counted amongst the many and various “somatic experts” as described by Nikolas Rose (2007): those professionals, from midwives and nutritionists to diverse therapists and counsellors, who specialize in aiding individuals manage the well-being of themselves and those they care for.
Below is a series of questions that contributions to the conference might be interested in exploring:
- How do designers specifically and/or differently relate to (conceptualize, objectify, promote, activate, exploit) the bodily well-being of the users of designed things? How is design’s expertise with and over human bodies comparable to, complements and/or intersects with the expertise of other professions?
- How does that expertise, in its current state, intersect and/or clash with political discourses on gender, race, disability and more? What can design and designers learn about the users’ bodies from research positions with strong standpoint epistemologies: more-than-human, postcolonial, intersectional feminist, and so on?
- What is expected from designers on that basis? What are some of the new and emergent strategies and approaches to designing for bodies? What do the current design practices and discourses highlight in relation to specific design approaches, competences, theoretical frameworks?
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
To send your proposal, fill in the form under “abstract submission” and upload a long abstract (800-1000 words excluding bibliography, Microsoft Word format) together with a short bio (max. 200 words) for each author by 1 November 2024 AoE.
We also ask for long abstracts from submissions in non-standard formats (demos and interventions). Material that is not possible to submit through the form such as videos should be included in the long abstract as links.
Send us chairs an email at designingforbodies@sdu.dk for questions about submissions.
IMPORTANT DATES
- 1 November 2024 (AoE) Submission deadline for long abstracts
- 22 November 2024 Notification of authors
- 6-7 February 2025 Conference
- 1 April 2025 Submission of first drafts for book chapters
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