Matter(ing) by Design:
Delegating Decisions / Activating Agency
A Design Studies Symposium
Presented by Parsons School of Design
with Carnegie Mellon University
Friday, April 10, 1:30 pm to 6:30 pm
Saturday, April 11, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Parsons’ Kellen Auditorium
66 Fifth Avenue
Free and open to the public
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
Friday, April 10
1:30 pm Welcome and Keynote
Susan Yelavich, Associate Professor, Director, MA Design Studies, School of Art and Design History and Theory, Parsons The New School for Design
2:15 pm Clash or Convergence: A Debate on Things & Design
Design has shifted from recognizing constraints to being aware of its place within an infinity of relations between and among sentient and insentient beings. So where do questions of political and social responsibility rest within this hyper-connected nervous system, in which design is both catalytic and artifactual? Does design need to rethink its role as humanizing material and virtual entities? Is ‘humanizing’ a relevant approach in light of the onset of things like robotic hybrids made of organic and inorganic matter? If not, then how do we design with care?
Ian Bogost, Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology
Cameron Tonkinwise, Director of Design Studies at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University
Moderator: Susan Yelavich
3:30 – 3:45 pm Coffee break
3:45 pm The Intelligence of Materials
Recent years have witnessed a shift in the central question of architecture and design. Now instead of asking how things, buildings, and places should look, we are more apt to ask how they should, can, and might behave and interact with the host of elements—seen and unseen—around them. In this session, three panelists known for their material investigations in the realms of infrastructure, landscape, and architecture will discuss their understandings of material capacities when understood as relational, hybrid, and never truly stable.
David Gissen, Associate Professor, Architecture, California
College of Art
Frano Violich, principal, Kennedy & Violich Architecture Ltd.
Linda Pollak, founding partner, Marpillero Pollak Architects
Moderator: Alfred Zollinger, Associate Professor, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons
5:30 – 6:30 pm Reception
Hirshon Suite, 55 W 13 St. , 2nd floor
Celebrating the publication of
Design As Future-Making. Susan Yelavich and Barbara Adams
Design and the Question of History. Clive Dilnot, Tony Fry, Susan Stewart
Saturday, April 11
10:00 am Coffee
10:30 am Welcome: Cameron Tonkinwise and Susan Yelavich
11:00 am The Political and Social Consequences of Materializing: The Case for, and the Challenge to, Design
Design is by nature a process of intervention in the social whether it is conducted through physical or virtual structures. When it functions as a mirror of entrenched and discriminatory practices, it is complicit in their determinism. But design can also offer resistance. It can project and envision new ways of interacting that change, or completely avoid, preconceptions of race, gender, and class. With particular emphasis on gender, the question to be considered here is: How is it possible to honor legitimate differences among us without reducing people to stereotypes through things?
Genevieve Bell, anthropologist; Vice President and Fellow, Director of Corporate Sensing & Insights Group, Intel
Debbie Chachra, Associate Professor. Materials Science, Olin College
Moderator: Shannon Mattern, Associate Professor, Media Studies, New School for Public Engagement
12:30 pm Lunch Break
2:00 pm Techno-determinism and Predictive Design
Egg-freezing technologies offer women opportunities to defer motherhood to a future when their career demands will supposedly be less pressing—for some a welcome prospect, for others a stick and carrot of the worst kind. Equally morally ambigous are apps for just-in-time services like Uber and Handy. Highly successful they also exacerbate already insecure conditions of employment by virtue of the temporal nature of the work involved. Then there are projects like Bridj, a Boston-based startup, which uses predictive analytics to bring urban transportation to you, not the designated bus stop. This panel will debate the merits and demerits of these disruptive innovations, and how design can take into account their affects on workers, consumers, and providers.
Rachel Abrams, founder, Turnstone Consulting LLC
Trebor Scholz, Associate Professor of Culture and Media, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts
Stuart Candy, Director of the Situation Lab, Foresight & Design Professor, OCAD University, and Fellow of The Long Now Foundation
Moderator: Cameron Tonkinwise
3:30 pm Break
3:45 pm Matter(ing): A Matter of Ethics? Morality ?
Design is an innately ethical act by virtue of the fact that it alters behavior. But what happens when design is deliberately moralizing? We generally applaud design that unrepentantly sets out to change behaviors that are hurtful and harmful to people and the environment. Is this exception a violation of meta-ethics? Or the point at which the theoretical rubber meets the road? To close the symposium, Clive Dilnot and Andy Norman will respond to these questions in view of the preceding discussions.
Clive Dilnot, Professor of Design Studies, Parsons School of Design
Andy Norman, Professor of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University