First International Conference on Critical Digital:
What Matter(s)?
18-19 April 2008
Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge MA 02138 USA
Call for papers: Extended abstracts (1000-1500 words) due January
11, 2008
The purpose of Critical Digital is to foster a dialogue about
digital media, digital technology, and design and to challenge the
basis of contemporary digital media arguments. The intention is to
identify, distinguish, and offer a critique on current trends,
tendencies, movements, and practices in digital culture. Critical
Digital provides a forum for discussion and enrichment of the
experiences in this discourse. Through diverse activities,
symposia, competitions, conferences, and publications, Critical
Digital is supporting dialogue that challenges what is rapidly
becoming the de facto mainstream. What is digital? Why should
design be (or not) digital? How have practitioners and schools been
using digital media?
The theme of the first conference is What Matter(s)? As the current
theoretical discourse in architecture seems to elude digital
phenomena, a crucial critical discussion is emerging as a means to
address, understand, clarify, and assess the elusive nature of this
discourse. Issues related to virtuality, ephemerality, continuity,
materiality, or ubiquity, to name a few, while originally invented
to explain digital or computational phenomena, are utilized today in
the context of a traditionally still material-based design. What is
the nature of their use? Is materiality subject to abstract digital
concepts? Is the digital buildable? What matters?
As we progress to think and design for the built environment,
interactive space, and the body what materializations are actually
emerging? What physical manifestations and manifestos are to be
promoted? Critical Digital presents and calls for your participation
in What Matter(s). Intentionally, the provocation is for both
critical writings and projective works which address the issue of
the digital within the contemporary design discourse.
What matter(s) in terms of work, process, and thought is to be
curated and published and to be debated in an open format at the
Graduate School of Design of Harvard University on April 18 and 19
of 2008.
Cultural changes based on the fast evolution of digital technologies
are continuously developing and affecting all of our activities as
professionals, academics, and citizens. Digital culture has affected
our notions as inhabitants and creators of a built environment,
changing and affecting the way we conceive, transform and produce
space.
In the first place, digital design and production processes are
simulating and integrating material and environmental conditions,
while addressing innovative methods of conception and physical
realization of ideas at all scales. This has opened rich areas of
research in design and important crosspollinations and
multidisciplinary approaches that reinforce and expand the
connections between practitioners, industry, and academia. It is a
challenge to creativity, rigor, and exploration, but also a product
of an increasingly complex understanding of what design is, of what
designers can produce, and their relation to the material and
physical conditions of the built environment.
It is also fundamental to understand how the development of
digitally enhanced products and spaces is affecting our experiences
at all scales. New ways of relationships and communications have
become quickly available, and imply new models of interaction with
the built environment, mediated through digital devices and embedded
computation. This also calls for a highly critical and
multidisciplinary approach to design, in order to engage the complex
phenomena and the fast development of technology without losing
sight of what matters - the "substance".
Translations, transformations, transportations of What Matter(s) in
design are being called to question. We are looking for positions,
projects, and proposals which address the value of the digital in
our design cultures. What Matter(s) is an event which invites people
interested in bridging or debunking issues of digital
material/virtual culture.
Significant Dates
Paper abstracts due, electronic (1000-1500 words)
11 January 2008
Authors informed of peer review results
15 February 2008
Accepted revised papers due (5 pages) electronic DOC or PDF
21 March 2008
Critical Digital Wikiposium
18-19 April 2008
Contact: <
mailto:cdc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> cdc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Web page: <
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/cdc> www.gsd.harvard.edu/cdc
Advisory Committee
Picon Antoine
Cohen Scott Preston
Terzidis Kostas
Meredith Michael
Rocker Ingeborg
Rueb Teri
Organizing Committee
Jan Jungclaus
Nashid Nabian
Zenovia Toloudi