goldsmithsdesign

Design and Sociology departments at Goldsmiths continue CSISP collaboration

Inventing the Social. CSISP anniversary symposium in the Orangery at Goldsmiths, organised by Noortje Marres, Michael Guggenheim and Alex Wilkie, May 2014

Alex Wilkie (Senior Lecturer in Design) has recently been appointed Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP) alongside Co-Directors Michael Guggenheim and Marsha Rosengarten from the Department of Sociology.

For more than ten years CSISP has been at the forefront of researching and understanding the interplay between science, technology, society and the environment. Based in the Department of Sociology, CSISP is an interdisciplinary research centre that hosts conferences, reading groups, research projects, salons, seminars, workshops, visiting researchers as well as supporting doctoral research amongst other activities. Common to all is the exploration and examination of the role of ‘invention’ – and related terms such as ‘creativity’, ‘innovation’, technology, discovery, change and novelty – in social and public life. CSISP facilitates collaboration and intervention across disciplines and practices that touch upon and create the ‘social’, including, but not limited to: design and social science, computation and sociology, issue advocacy and inventive social methods, markets and economics, biomedicine and innovation in social research, the arts and environmental science.

CSISP was founded in 2003 by Andrew Barry and was inaugurated by Bruno Latour with a lecture on the question of “how not to change vehicles” in moving from micro to macro in the social study of invention. Since then, CSISP has been directed by Mariam Motamedi Fraser, Mike Michael, Marsha Rosengarten, Noortje Marres.

The latest issue of EASST review features an overview of CSISP, which is available to download here. CSISP Online includes reflections on CSISP activities and the CSISP pages on the Goldsmiths website contain an archive of the various events the research centre has hosted over the past decade, many of which feature ongoing dialogues between design and social science.

Interaction Design students presented their work placement experiences

_DSC0019_1

On Friday, students from the MA in Interaction Design course held presentations describing their experiences on work placements they undertook for the ‘Researching and Designing in the Field’ module.

The organisations where students worked were varied, ranging from charities to universities, to private sector companies and small start-ups, or even as near as near as Goldsmiths’ own Interaction Research Studio. The roles that students filled during their internships were varied as well, and included research, prototyping robots, developing apps, graphic design, service design, and administrative duties.

The questions and issues that arose from these experiences proved to be complex: tackling the limitations and frustrations of the working environment you are entering, conflicts between designing with business in mind and designing for the user, defining what it means to work for making the world a better place were just some of the points that came up in the feedback received by the students from co-programme leader Tobie Kerridge.

Unlike other postgraduate students at Goldsmiths Design, whose graduation show took place during the Goldsmiths Design Festival last month, Interaction Design students will finish their course at the end of the year, so be prepared to hear more about them soon. They are also keeping a blog which you should follow if you want to be up to date with news on their work.

Metadesign workshops with Goldsmiths Design students at the Unusual Suspects Festival

Meaghan McClure, Bruno Patias Volpi and Marie Elvik Hagen have just finished their MA course in Design Futures and Metadesign here at Goldsmiths, and next week they’ll be representing the University at the Unusual Suspects Festival in Glasgow, a three-day event exploring social innovation.

The Goldsmiths group will facilitate two sessions on design, collaboration and change agency, both on Thursday, October 8th (10-12 am and 2-4 pm): “The workshop will present several Metadesign tools and promote the development of re-directive propositions for local change, and open a dialogue between academics, community groups, policy makers and businesses about designing the futures we want to see”.

Tickets to the workshops are free, so don’t miss it if you’re in Glasgow next week!

Goldsmiths Design Festival wrap-up

We’ve already talked about some of the highlights from our Goldsmiths Design Festival (3-9 September), but the festival weekend was full of great events from which it was hard to pick where to go first.

One of the most exciting events taking place was the Draw to Perform symposium, curated by artist Ram Samocha, which brought to Goldsmiths a line-up of daring, unique performance art sessions involving, amongst other things, a glue gun, milk and nudity. Continue reading “Goldsmiths Design Festival wrap-up”