Making Mobilities: At the Intersections of Wearables and Mobilities Research
Date: 5 June 2015 Time: 10.30am to 1.30pm
Venue: Design studio C01, LICA Building, Lancaster University.
A seminar led by Tricia Flanagan, visiting research fellow at CeMoRe. Through two conjoined activities, a seminar and a prototyping workshop, we will extend conversations between wearable technology research and mobilities research, engaging with cultural, experience based and techno-futurist approaches. Speakers include: Tricia Flanagan, Di Mainstone, Alex Haagaard & Johnny Huck.
Wearable technology enables new connected forms of mobility. Its appropriation transforms the way we experience our bodies and the environments we’re in, the way live and interact. Micro-macro relationships between the body and wider systems such as mobility and transport, healthcare, weather, food supply, production, consumption, education, poltics, policy, governance, and the law are transformed as small data becomes big data (Thrift 2011, Kitchin 2013, Estrin 2014). There is the potential for more control over everyday lives through objects and sensors worn next to the skin, but there is also potential for ‘getting under the skin of systems" finding more nuanced understanding and control over systems " a more reflexive and reflective relationship. We are, one might argue, witnessing the emergence of a new paradigm in terms of the human scale. By augmenting embodied experiences and perspectives, our perception of scale expands. From the imperceptibly small, even nano-scale to an awareness and sensitivity of events at macro levels that shape our normative environment" an amplified awareness of the instability, fungability and interconnectedness of things is transformative. This seminar and workshop ask how we might develop wearables that foster these senses rather than dull them?
As part of the ‘Being Mobile’ series of workshops linking LICA and the mobilities.lab, we will explore how practices of making become mobile research methods. Throughout the day we will develop ways to enhance the somaesthetic capacities of the body posing questions such as: How is our embodied materiality affected by emerging technologies? What is the relationship of the self to the proliferation of wearable technologies? How is our sense-of-self changing as new technologies mediate the space between our experience of self and the world?
If you would like to also attend the prototyping workshop please contact Jen Southern j.a.southern@lancaster.ac.uk for further details
Seminar: 10.30am -1.30pm
Lunch: 1.30 - 2pm
Event website: http://makingmobilities.eventbrite.co.uk
Contact:
Who can attend: Anyone
Further information
Associated staff:
Organising departments and research centres: Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe), Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Mobilities.Lab, Sociology
Keywords: Mobilities, Science and technology, Science and technology studies, Technologies, Technology, Technoscience
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