Design and the Spaced-Out Subject

By:

There are many stories about subjectivity, its meaning, construction & even its death. It has been a central element of my own work for many years. It has been a contention of my philosophical work that subjectivity is spaced, that space is material & that subjectivity is material. Such a materiality of connections between these concepts is worth re-examining now insofar as we can locate the coming together of space & subjectivity in designed objects. What we will consider here, then, is the role that design, its production of objects, & the consumption & digestion of these objects has in the material spatializing of subjectivities. This paper will therefore re-examine some of the connections between space seen as matter (not as emptiness) & subjectivity from the perspective of design theory & practice.

Stream: Aesthetics, Design

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Interests: Technology and its engagement with the human. Chaos and nonlinear dynamics especially as they are manifest in cultural material. Body modification and questions of identity. The philosophical works of Kant, Bachelard and Deleuze+Guattari. The philosophy of design.

History: Graduated MA Philosophy and Literature, University of Warwick, 1988 and PhD Philosophy, University of Warwick,1993. PhD thesis, 'Cartographies of Subjectification', established a material link between subjectivity and space & engaged with the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Gaston Bachelard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Most of the 1990s I worked on the consequences for our senses of self of body modification, from the use of fashion in its most basic sense to the more extreme ideas of cyborg-production.

Currently: Teaching Product Design. Working with design industry on formulating new design processes. Working on a book which deals with the philosophical consequences of the increasingly intimate relations between humans & machines, called 'CyberDesire'. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts since 2000. DJ since 1994.