The Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society (CSTMS) at UC Berkeley invites you to join us for an exploration of the the social and cultural dynamics of contemporary design. The workshop is a chance to foster dialogue among the design studies community, professional designers and architects, historians, and science and technology studies scholars. These communities often engage very similar objects and problems, and through a continuing series of workshops and events, CSTMS seeks to strengthen their interaction, analytic insights, and practical implementations.

From urban planning to the design of everyday objects to creating our digital landscape, questions of design lead each of these communities to rethink how the social is embedded in and shaped by our built environment. Some of the themes that we would like to engage with in this and future events include: materials and their politics; fabrication, labor, and craft; the built, the made, the real, the discursive; changing conditions of knowledge- and thing-production; new and old; innovating, imitating, and replicating.

Past Events

BerkeleyDesignSTS

Held on 2 December 2011, Our first event in this Special Project featured a day-long discussion about the current state of design research in several academic fields.  See the event page for more information.