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Emerging technologies - some strategies for a future of design and the formation of somatic experience
online resource
posted on 2007-06-12, 09:56 authored by Stephen ThompsonThis brief paper highlights some of the issues that
have arisen in a research that emerging from the
experience of attempting to extend design analysis
and criticism into those student projects which
engaged with ‘incorporated technologies’ such as
nanotechnology, virtual and augmented reality, DNA
computing or implant augmentation. The research
itself will take the form of a number of narratives
intended to explore and invite discussion of ideas
drawn from philosophy and science, posited as a
means to initiate discussion among designers. This
paper particularly explores how this process of
dialogue arose from the discussion of complex and
‘uncertain’ ideas with student designers and
emerged from the experience of developing
curricula for the undergraduate ‘design futures’
course at the University of Wales. It is suggested
that issues emerging from this research may have
some impact upon the design of future pedagogies
for design education and upon the future of
industrial design conceptualisation. Questions are
raised of the methodology of those designers who
claim to model users experiences through
metaphoric or comparative allusion to antique
models of mechanical processes or through social
interactions conceived to bear comparison with
established human rituals. The paper describes how
a speculative method of dialogue is being designed
in order to explore the potential of an extensionist
philosophical model. The dialogic method, whilst still
in the process of construction, is centred upon a
process of ‘story-telling’. It is anticipated that these
stories will go some way towards the embodied,
inclusion of emerging uncertain and unorthodox
ideas of ‘extension’ in philosophy, biology, ecology,
psychology and neuroscientific into the schema of
industrial design conceptualisation.
History
School
- Design
Research Unit
- D&T Association Conference Series
Publisher
© DATAPublication date
2004Notes
This is a conference paperLanguage
- en