The Clore Study Room, Victoria and Albert Museum, 13 March 2015

V&A Design Culture Salon: How does design address immobility in our society?

As part of the V&A’s regular Design Culture Salon, Carmen Papalia will be joining a panel of industry experts to discuss spaces of immobility to reveal some of the inconsistencies and resistances in contemporary design culture. Bodies of the disabled, ill and elderly are difficult to find in design history, while contemporary design is often more eager to engage in idealized forms of engineeringthe urban mobile citizen. So, how can the enabling capacities of design be improved? What are the challenges and obstacles here? How can they be overcome? What can designers learn from cultural theories and histories of the representation of the body and from a wider reading of disability studies?

Chair
Rob Imrie, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, London
Panel
Ana Carden-Coyne, Co-Director of Cultural History of War, University of Manchester and author of Reconstructing the Body
James Grant, Senior Communications Manager, Transport for London
Graham Pullin,
Course Director of Interaction Design at the Duncan Jordanstone College
of Art, University of Dundee and author of Design Meets Disability
Carmen Papalia, V&A and Adam Reynolds Memorial Resident, in partnership with Shape
Alison Thomson, PhD Candidate, Goldsmiths, London