Social
Spaces

This special issue of the journal invites papers, projects and reviews exploring and developing the notion of Design Fictions. One of the early proponents of Design Fictions, the author Bruce Sterling, said that design: “seeks out ways to jump over its own conceptual walls – scenarios, user observation, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, critical design, speculative design” (Sterling, 2009). Despite the current burgeoning of this field and its various histories and antecedents, the coming together of design and fiction, as ‘design fictions’, remains relatively underexplored.

Design Fictions might also be sensed as a ‘speculative turn’ in design practice, founding a new engagement in ‘prototyping’ conjectural projections of designed futures. In the context of ever-present near futures, projected as scenarios that threaten radical ruptures of the real, digital creativity expands into a post-digital cybernetics. Design Fictions speculative design methodologies take their cue from science fiction, Sterling however would also have it the other way around, saying that: “design and literature don’t talk together much, but design has more to offer literature at the moment than literature can offer design” (Sterling, 2009).

This issue seeks to put design and literature into conversation. The journal wishes to ask how Design Fictions and related methodological work have mutated or glitched across art, design and architecture, for example in response to ‘design fictions’ (Nokia/Bleecker); in ‘critical design’ (Dunne & Raby); in speculative and visionary architecture (Spiller); in science fiction as prototyping (Intel/Johnson); and in ethnographic work on design and prototyping (Kelty).

Deadline for extended abstracts: 5 March 2012
Website: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/NDCR

Publication about this call in Wired: http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/12/design-fiction-digital-creativity-special-issue-on-design-fictions/

SupraSpace: On the Concept of Space and Place in Art and Visual Culture
International Conference
Tel Aviv University, Art History Department

June 3 – 04, 2012
Deadline CFP: Jan 15, 2012

Keynote speaker: Prof. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Department of Art and
Archaeology, Princeton University

Space has been subject to aesthetic, art-historical, philosophical,
anthropological, geographical and political investigations, each with
its idiosyncratic definitions. Space maintains a close relation with
illusionism, narrativity, and the performative qualities of art.  Space
is especially interconnected with time, making it impossible to
separate one from the other. In the current dynamic reality in which we
live, it is hard to remain confined to just one modality of spatial
thinking that will capture all of its complexity; yet this problem is
not limited to our contemporary globalized moment, but is also relevant
to different historical periods. Consequently, in order to engage
effectively with the problem of space, recent studies have demonstrated
multiple methods of conceptualization, while emphasizing the
dialectical relations and tensions between them.
Within the realms of art and culture, the discourse on space has often
engaged with problems of representation (artistic genres such
landscape, narrative space, chronotopos, interior/exterior, etc), or
with political issues relating to territorial conflicts and borders.

In early ‘2011, the Media and Design faculty in Genk participated in the exhibition Alter Nature, where works from around twenty international artists explored how humankind manipulates nature. We got to know what synthetic biology is and how much more manipulative ‘design’ can be in this field. We also learned that as media designer or artist one can imagine and visualize a future with synthetic biology, which makes it interesting to collaborate with scientists. When me, (media) designer and a (graphic) designer where asked by our design school (MAD Faculty) to join the iGEM competition – a competition between universities on the topic of synthetic biology – we took advantage of this unique opportunity. Between June and November 2011 we collaborated with bioengineers and biomedical science students. In iGEM, teams make or use existing biological parts to build biological systems and operate them in living cells(1). For instance, a student team could be designing a microbe that detects toxic chemicals and outputs a corresponding color.

Eutropolis – imagine a city is an initiative of the SocialBeta Foundation in co-creation with NEIMED, Maurer United Architects and several other partners.

We challenge designers, urbanists, photographers, researchers and other disciplines to imagine a city called Eutropolis. Share with us your idea or dream about Eutropolis and it’s future. Your contribution might be a graphic design, an essay, a poem, a photoshoot or an artwork.

Want to contribute?

Send your proposal no later than 15th of December to eutropolis@ibeta.eu.
The publication will be spread throughout Eutropolis with your work included. Also, you’ll be our guest at the TEDxEutropolis conference on the 4th of February 2012 in Hasselt (B).

During her workingperiod in Kilpisjärvi, Rosanne van Klaveren gave a workshop at the Small Projects gallery in Tromsø about arctic food in general and about her FOOD RELATED project in particular. After a short presentation and introduction to the online platform at  www.foodrelated.org, a very usefull mapping was made with the MAP-it tool developed by Social Spaces collegues. The participants also worked with cultural probes to focus more on the experience, meaning, future and difficulties of food within the circumpolar north.