The Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society (CSTMS) at UC Berkeley has begun a new Special Project to explore the social and cultural dynamics of contemporary design. It 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 Project 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.
CSTMS affiliated members are welcome to propose events, working groups, or other activities to be included under this Project. The CSTMS office is here to help you make those events happen as well.