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Call for Papers
Designing Everyday Experience
Objects, Environments, Habits
Maholy-Nagy University of Art and Design
Budapest, Hungary
11-13 May 2023
Deadline: December 31, 2022
EVANET – Everyday Aesthetics Network and the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest (MOME), warmly invite paper proposals for the three-day international conference ‘Designing Everyday Experience’. Celebrating the 25th anniversary of MOME’s doctoral school, the event will offer an opportunity for those with an interest in the philosophy and aesthetics of everyday life and design to share and discuss work, in the hope of furthering dialogue in this area.
In 1952, the Italian architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers used the motto “from the spoon to the city” to express the pervasiveness of architectural design, spanning from the very small scale of everyday tools to the much larger scale of urban spaces and environments. Inspired by this famous motto and its symbolic value, the conference aims to extend the notion of design to the whole realm of our everyday life, encompassing the various objects, spaces, and practices of our everydayness, and questioning how these may contribute to shaping our habits, tastes, behaviors, and lifestyles. Just as we design the tools that help us in the various tasks of our daily lives, so we design public and private places in the city to be used by the locals and enjoyed by the visitors. Similarly, in contemporary art, artists design, set up, and install spaces so that they yield a certain aesthetic experience for the visitor. In all these instances, more than as a profession with specific rules and know-how, design is understood as an act of planning and shaping that can apply to any object of our daily experience.
On this basis, the conference draws on three specific axes of design:
Objects and Tools. This most traditional notion of design has to do with the creation of functional as well as purely aesthetic artefacts, such as works of art and decorative items. Objects and tools are either understood as physical or digital entities, including those that are either permanent or temporary.
Environments and Spaces. In this second sense, design relates to a variety of activities ranging from architecture, urbanism, and environmental planning – not excluding virtual environments – to the practices of renovating and repurposing spaces, reconfiguring locations for purposes of tourism, exploiting lands for real estate speculation interest, or occupying areas for growing social cohesion, ecological improvements, and environmental art.
Habits and Practices. Design refers here to how we shape our lives to achieve certain goals: the routines and habits we develop in everyday life and how they help determine our identity and our relationship to the world.
Abstracts are invited in all areas related to the aesthetics and philosophy of design, broadly construed. Submissions dealing with the future challenges of design in everyday contexts are particularly welcome. New, complex, uncertain scenarios are awaiting us. How are we to design our future everyday life experiences?
Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following issues:
Objects and Tools
How can objects of design help us shape our everyday habits and routines by corralling our behavioral patterns? How can designers create objects’ affordances to conform to users’ needs? How do power relations define the standards of everydayness through designed objects and tools? What is the specific contribution of art objects in shaping and defining our everydayness? How can we aim for a balance between usability, aesthetic values and low environmental impact when designing new objects? How will new communication tools change our everyday experience? To what extent will the developments of virtual environments (metaverse, AltspaceVR etc.) affect our everyday lives? How do relate everydayness and hyperobjects?
Environments and Spaces
How can we design environments/spaces (cityscape, soundscape, parks, places for sightseeing, skywalks) with the aim of triggering a specific aesthetic experience (sublimity, picturesque, etc.)? Atmospheres of everyday environments: how to conceptualize the natural and artificial components of atmospheres felt in designed environments on various scales? How can art shape our aesthetic appreciation of a space? In particular, what underlies the aesthetic experience of art forms such as installation art and environmental art? What is the relationship between the city and new urban technologies (smart cities, IoT, integration of water retention parks), mobility (integrated transport system, cycle paths, on time measurement of traffic peaks), and the design of sustainable architecture? How will climate change contribute to re-designing our experience of the natural and built environment?
Habits and Practices
What is the contribution of routines in building our experience of the world? What role do habits play in supporting, regulating and enabling our aesthetic life? How do practices such as industrial, digital, and urban design, fashion, and clothing extend or narrow the everyday experiential spectrum? How do professionals and consumers/prosumers participate in these dynamics through routine transactionality? How do expert and lay activities, habits, and routines take part in shaping our design landscapes? What kinds of dynamics prevail between the roles of professionals and consumers/prosumers?
Can artistic practices help promote pro-environmental social behaviors and habits? Can they help us develop aesthetic sensitivity that makes people more respectful towards the environment in which they inhabit? How are we to rethink some of our most controversial social practices and lifestyles (tourism, traveling, food consumption, cloth) to make them more sustainable?
Cross-cutting Methodological Issues:
What is the theoretical nexus between design and everydayness? Where is the fine line between the ordinary and the extraordinary in a design culture? How should we conceive of the relationship between the philosophy and aesthetics of everyday life and design?
Important information:
The conference will be structured around plenary sessions, with the contributed papers selected by a blind peer-review process. Contributed papers will be scheduled for a 25-minute presentation plus a 15-minute discussion.
Please submit long abstracts in English of 800-1000 words (references included), prepared for blind refereeing, by using the online submission form. Abstracts should state the position defended or the issue discussed and indicate the outline of the argument.
For further information, please contact: design.conference.2023@gmail.com
Announcement
EVA Network
Everyday Aesthetics Network
Founding partners
- University of Palermo (Italy) – Elisabetta Di Stefano (promoter and coordinator)
- University of Roma3 (Italy) – Lisa Giombini
- University of Bologna (Italy) – Giovanni Matteucci, Gioia Laura Iannilli
- University of Presov (Slovakia) – Adrian Kvokacka
- Aalto University (Finland) – Ossi Naukkarinen, Max Ryynänen, Sanna Lehtinen
- University of Helsinki (Finland) – Arto Haapala
- Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne (France) – Barbara Formis
- University of Brno (Czech Republic) – Lenka Lee
- Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca (Romania) – Dan Eugen Ratiu
- University of Warsaw (Poland) – Mateusz Salwa,
- University of Vienna (Austria) – Madalina Diaconu, Jörg Türschmann
- University of Malaga (Spain) – Rosa Fernández Gómez
- University of Siviglia (Spain) – Maria Jesus Godoy
Honorary partners
Yuriko Saito (Rhode Island School of Design)
Emily Brady (Texas A&M University)
Thomas Leddy (San Jose State University)
The EVA Network aims to cross the thematic boundaries posed by Everyday Aesthetics as a subdiscipline of Anglo-American Aesthetics. The EVAnet was promoted by the University of Palermo (Italy), taking its cue from the increase of conferences and publications on topics related to Everyday Aesthetics carried out in Europe in recent years. The goal of the network is to promote diverse theoretical perspectives and new topics by coordinating the activities of its partners within an institutional framework. The EVAnet includes 13 European institutions; however, the agreement is open to other institutions around the world, which may later apply to join this network.
The network has received the endorsement and support of several scholars, such as Yuriko Saito, Thomas Leddy, and Emily Brady, who originally animated the debate on Everyday and Environmental Aesthetics, and who are part of the network as honorary partners.
Although the network’s name refers to the Aesthetics of the Everyday, the field of research is open to new interpretations and applications that cross and transcend the original thematic boundaries to enhance philosophical thinking about everyday life, orienting it toward new paths.
Call For Papers & Media
Conference
REINVENTING MUSEOLOGY. The Role of Conceptual Art
Fondation Maison Science de l’Homme
Raspail, Paris
6-7 October 2022
Submission Deadline 15 May 2022
The scope of this conference is to reflect from an interdisciplinary perspective on the role that contemporary art – and especially conceptual art – had for the progressive critical reform and democratization of museology since the beginning of the 20th century. We are looking for contributions that discuss historic and recent case-studies, theories and solutions that emerged in the context of a new, social museology.
How did conceptual art contribute in time to the re-thinking of the museum as practice (social and cultural), which had important implications for promoting de-colonial thinking, allowing multiple narratives, including secondary objects and marginalized histories into the museologic narrative and expanding the identity of the heritage object with an ephemeral dimension.
The call is open to contributions from anthropology, social sciences, education science, design, performance studies, aesthetics. We would like to follow how do these approaches reflect back into the discipline of museology, determining a shift towards a de-colonial and social museology. A publication will be issued in 2022-2023 that includes the conference proceedings, related articles by the conference participants and artistic portfolios.
Lectures, films, videos, and photography submissions welcome. Include CV (max. 3 pg.), abstract (max. 400 words), and optional visual material (1-2 images, jpg format) to you submission to: reinventingmuseology@msh-paris.fr
For more information: https://www.fmsh.fr/en/our-work/call-papers-reinventing-museology-role-conceptual-art?fbclid=IwAR1-1CWAN2cca2AhmAS–yH0dYdgKv9o0l3HZEbdgrMz4Ut8jHks0bItaIU
Call for Papers
“Aesthetics and a World in Crisis”
Contemporary Aesthetics
Contact: Yuriko Saito, editor@contempaesthetics.org
Deadline: August 31, 2022
In addition to open submissions, Contemporary Aesthetics invites submissions on the theme, “Aesthetics and a World in Crisis,” to be published as a thematic cluster in the current Volume 20 (2022).
The world today is in the midst of several unprecedented crises, most notably the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and climate change. At Contemporary Aesthetics, we welcome your thoughts on the relevance of aesthetics to these contemporary calamities.
For example, how does aesthetics help us understand the forms of human interactions forced on us by the pandemic? How have masks and technology modified or eliminated the role played by the body in human communications? What is the relationship between aesthetics and violence? Can art and aesthetics play a role in representing and caring for those affected by the pandemic or the war? Are aesthetic considerations salient in restoring a sense of place, atmosphere, or home for those displaced by war and climate change? Has our “aesthetic life” been damaged or dramatically changed by the current crises or do these crises present a challenge or opportunity to forge new forms of aesthetic life? How can art and aesthetics help represent the future that is being dramatically altered by these current events?
Please submit your work addressing any issues related to aesthetics and a world in crisis by August 31, 2022. All submissions will go through the journal’s regular double-blind peer-review process. For submission guidelines, please see here.
Please contact editor@contempaesthetics.org with any questions.
Call for Proposals
Transcultural Aesthetics: The International Association for Aesthetics Book Series
Contact: manfred.milz@
Deadline: 15 January 2022
You are kindly invited to contribute to a new research outlet: Transcultural Aesthetics: The International Association for Aesthetics Book Series that will be published by Brill. This call for monographs and edited volumes encompasses, but is not strictly limited to, intercultural comparisons, inter- and trans-disciplinary western and non-western aesthetics, geopolitical aesthetics (ecologically and politically motivated migration; reevaluating colonialism and its cultural heritage), relations between philosophical and cultural-oriented aesthetics, media- and techno-aesthetics, aesthetics of historical and contemporary arts.
Please, find further details on the project in the announcement on the website of the IAA:
https://iaaesthetics.org/item/
The deadline for its first submission round is 15 January 2022, but submissions are accepted after this date on a rolling basis.
Send your initial project proposal to the editor-in-chief of the Transcultural Aesthetics Books Series, Manfred Milz: milzm@web.de; manfred.milz@