Design Culture Salon 15: How does design address immobilities in our society?

Friday 13 March
6:30-8:30pm

Clore 55, British Galleries

While Design Culture Salon 10 looked at the concept of movement in urban culture, this salon focuses on spaces of immobility to reveal some of the inconsistencies and resistances in contemporary design culture. Bodies of the disabled, ill and elderly are difficult to find in design history, while contemporary design is often more eager to engage in idealized forms of engineering the urban mobile citizen. So, how can the enabling capacities of design be improved? What are the challenges and obstacles here? How can they be overcome? What can designers learn from cultural theories and histories of the representation of the body and from a wider reading of disability studies?

Chair: Rob Imrie, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, London

Panel:
Ana Carden-Coyne, Co-Director of Cultural History of War, University of Manchester and author of Reconstructing the Body
James Grant, Senior Communications Manager, Transport for London
Graham Pullin, Course Director of Interaction Design at the Duncan Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee and author of Design Meets Disability
Carmen Papalia, V&A and Adam Reynolds Memorial Resident, in partnership with Shape
Alison Thomson, PhD Candidate, Goldsmiths, London

Free event; All welcome!

Directions to Clore 55 here:

http://www.vam.ac.uk/digital/map/#l=2&r=facility_clore_study_area