More-than-Human Situated Design

31. Mai 2021, 16.30 bis 17.30 Uhr ONLINE on MS Teams

Invited Lectures Series on Critical Data mit Karmen Franinovic.

Meeting Link: teams.microsoft.com 
For connectivity problems, please contact davide.bevilacqua@ufg.at

Since anthropologist Lucy Suchmann’s work on situated action, situated knowledge has been central to ethnographic approaches in design (Suchmann 1987). These approaches have since become increasingly location-sensitive, inclusive and emphatic, although focused dominantly on human needs and technology innovation. The shift from user-centred design to human-centred and, most recently to planet-centred design, calls for design practices beyond human. Following more-than-human approaches in anthropology and design (Galloway 2020, Tsing 2016, Escobar 2018) and grounded in fieldwork practices in the arts (Kuzmanovic and Gaffney 2019), this lecture proposes situated design techniques for sensing and empathising across living and non-living species.

Karmen Franinović is Professor of Interaction Design at Zurich University of the Arts and the founder of Enactive Environments Lab. She is moved by the desire to explore and to create complex and ephemeral processes, be it a soundscape, a research technique or an ecosystem. Focused on embodied and spatial interaction, Franinović worked on the design of large scale public buildings; created participatory urban environments; developed active materials, shape-changing sculptures, haptic floors and wearables. She holds the Laurea degree in Architecture from Venice University, the MA from Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and the PhD degree in Art and Media from Plymouth University, Planetary Collegium. Franinović shares her research widely, through publishers such as MIT Press and venues such as Centre Pompidou