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SESSIONS
The concept of social engagement gradually shifts the status quo of design professionals. We observe a growing emphasis of both design and architectural schools on community based learning, design-build studios, and participatory design. A crucial issue of investigation is the two major emerging models—first, partnership between the local community and design studios and second, the developed-developing world design studio partnership in which often a group of students from European or American universities design and build in a foreign and developing world’s context. Papers in this session discuss how architects and designers consider and perceive the potential and limits of the public sphere, the reciprocal relationship between citizenship and professionalism; and, community and society in their work. Questions in this session may include: how the notion of society, community, and public are different from or similar to that of the social and political science? Why is it important for the discipline to review the individual client-based model and increase the emphasis on an abstract concept of collective society as client? What benefits would it possibly bring to the discipline? Can design professions contribute to constructing and sustaining a new discourse of public sphere in a true sense?
1
Engagement
and
Radical
Pedagogy
The global context of socially engaged design is far from a homogenous construct. Several factors limit and control its formation and operation. Such factors may include economic austerity, climate change, war, foreclosure, increasing global poverty, microfinance, the evolving notion of professionalism, the changing conception of public, NGO-based social business, and finally the growing academic interest in re-visioning and sustaining the utopia – design and architecture as a means of radical social change. The notion of citizen-designers, as promoted by socially engaged design, is a product of two reciprocal forces: politics of empathy and benevolence for the disenfranchised and individual’s ethical obligation as citizens and professionals. The questions of this session may include: should social activism and social engagement be considered as the major task of any designer, or is any extra disciplinary activity that socially engaged design offers to expand its professional capacity relevant to the discipline? When design professionals address marginality in the design process, how relevant is it to take into account the actual production of social exclusion? Have the discourse of aesthetics and principles of form and geometry been made secondary, if not marginal, and overshadowed by social commitment of the practice? Where to create the disciplinary boundaries and autonomy? Or are there any?
2
Utopoa or
Engagement?
(Future of Social Engagement)
Design agency is a concept that interprets the role of designers as being beyond passive form-givers of market forces, and enables moments when designers act as agents who are empowered to alter society’s power structure through design. The crucial questions associated with this notion are: is agency a reincarnation or reformation of modernist utopia or could it be made sustainable and pragmatic? What are the methodologies needed to create professionals as agents of social change instead of servers of market demands? Papers in this section will investigate socially engaged design’s claim of transforming both the designer and the participant users as agents and, thus, empowering them. By using social and political theories of empowerment the focus of this section is to understand design agency and the empowerment of the users. Questions may include whether socially engaged design actually empowers the participants and alleviates socio-economic exclusion or if it instead indirectly sustains an exploitive capitalism. To what extent does the new environment of social engagement actually empower the participants to act and bring change? Does the designed environment transform them into active social agents in a true sense?
Agency
& Empowerment
3
Scarcity
Poverty &
Exclusion
4
This session investigates scarcity and poverty as the two basic contexts that socially engaged design has considered for its operation. The argumentative aspect of such contextualization is whether scarcity and poverty are intensified as a new capital or not. The main focus of this section is on how resource scarcity, poverty, and socio-economic exclusion set the boundary conditions of design and how socially engaged design responds to those conditions. A core issue of this investigation is to understand how a new situation of economic austerity forges new design processes and aesthetic perimeters.
Politics &
Spectacle of
Social
Engagement
5
In the discourse of design, poverty and socio-economic exclusion are often considered as natural phenomenon, or as an inevitable byproduct of neoliberal society. In many instances socially engaged design aimed at mitigating poverty and economic or social exclusion tends to omit the political factors of exclusion and understands it solely as a question of technique. Thus, it displays and promotes social engagement, through exhibition, books and public media as a mass show of public spectacle. Articles in this section study the politics of reducing design as a technique to eradicate poverty. Or, in other words, by engaging design to eradicate socio-economic exclusion, poverty is eventually reduced to a technical problem that could be solved through organized technology, in which socially engaged design is among other instruments. This session invites papers that investigates how the new design genre of social engagement is entangled in the global politics of poverty, reconstruction of the public sphere, changing role of the state, charity, neoliberal urbanism, and above all the transformation of a modern avant-garde that engages in ceaseless grappling to negotiate between the designer's role as a revolutionary social agent and the discipline's exclusive aesthetic implication.
Open
Session
6
Proposals that do not strictly fit within the above-described themes but are in congruence with the main theme of the symposium may be submitted in this category.
Conference proceedings are going to be available as e-book via Kansas University’s digital library with an ISBN number and will be sent to be reviewed for inclusion in Google Scholar. All abstracts and full papers will be peer reviewed by an International Scientific committee.
Conference Proceedings
