Making and Opening: Entangling Design and Social Science - conference delegate hand-out

Abstract

Design and social science disciplines intersect at a number of points. While there is excellent work exploring many of these points of contact, there is also a tendency for social science to treat design as a topic (e.g. what does design do and how might this be accounted for in sociological terms?), and for design to treat social science as a resource (e.g. what useful knowledge does sociology produce and how can this be deployed to model users or construct scenarios?). This day conference aims to contribute to the move beyond this pattern. Collecting a group of leading practitioners in design and social science, the conference will present a series of dialogues and commentaries on a range of common, open issues. Specifically, the format runs like this: invited speakers (Harvey, Michelle, Pelle and Bill) will speak for around 25 minutes; there will then be a short response/reflection/ discussion from a local colleague (please see below), then 20 minutes open discussion. Each titled session is not rigidly defined, rather the topics are simply prompts to further thought, for instance: how might the practices of speculative or critical designers furnish social science with new insights into the study and articulation of society? How might social science’s interest in complexity contribute to the iterative process of making in design? In what ways might these fit together or articulate? In the final session, Lucy will make provide some general observations and comments and there will be a final open discussion

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This paper was published in Goldsmiths Research Online.

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