Institute for Advanced Studies Conference

New Sciences of Protection:  Designing Safe Living Conference
Lancaster University, UK, July 10-12, 2008

This interdisciplinary conference explores issues at the intersections of security, safety, design, science and technology.  Papers, exhibitions, and presentations on any of these areas are welcome. his research programme investigates how design of objects, systems, places, and services engender feelings of safety for individuals and groups. It particularly focues on the intersection of design and specific sciences and technologies. It central questions are:

• How is ‘safe living’ conceived of by designers, artist-writers, policy makers and regulators, scientist-engineers, social scientists and humanities scholars, and how do these conceptualisations of ‘safe living’ engage with sciences and technologies of protection?
• Is ‘safe living’ achievable?
• And if ‘safe living’ were achievable, would it be desirable – as a politics, as an ethics, as a day-to-day way of live – and would it make us ‘safe’?

A key aim of the research programme is to think about design, protection, and safe living in open-ended  conceptually and practically inventive ways. Keynote speakers are designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, filmmaker Lynn Hersman Leason, and academics Benjamin H. Bratton, Lucy Suchman, Susan Silby, and Richard Buchanan.

Please submit abstracts to a.mumford@lancaster.ac.uk by April 15, 2008.  Please register for the conference by May 15, 2008 to receive a discounted rate.

Further information about the conference including registration information can be found on the conference website.