Designing Place in a Changing World

Presented by TOPOS LAB: advancing place research

The Designing Place in a Changing World symposium examines the philosophical, cultural, material, and political conditions through which places are experienced and transformed in times of rapid transformations. It considers design as a significant mode of engagement with place, encompassing the production of spatial, material, visual, technological, and social environments.

Place has been a sustained concern across philosophy, geography, architecture, anthropology, cultural studies, and design. It encompasses questions of situatedness, embodiment, identity, memory, belonging, dwelling, territory, and relations between human and more-than-human worlds. Contemporary conditions of environmental change, technological development, urban transformation, displacement, and political contestation raise further questions concerning how place is understood and produced.

The symposium provides an interdisciplinary forum for scholars and practitioners working across design, philosophy, architecture, geography, urbanism, anthropology, ethnography, environmental humanities, cultural studies, and related fields. Contributions may address theoretical, historical, empirical, methodological, or practice-based questions concerning the relationship between place and design.

We invite researchers, designers, architects, geographers, town planners and engineers, artists, philosophers, practitioners, and scholars to contribute papers and presentations of up to 25 minutes addressing the relationship between place, design, and contemporary conditions of change.

The conference is particularly concerned with the following questions:

• How has the concept of place been formulated within philosophical and theoretical traditions?

• What ontological and epistemological questions arise from the relationship between place and design?

• How does design participate in the constitution, representation, and transformation of place?

• What constitutes a place, and through what relations does place acquire meaning?

• How do embodiment, perception, memory, affect, identity, and belonging inform experiences of place?

• How do materiality and spatiality contribute to the constitution of place

• How are histories and cultural practices inscribed within designed environments?

• How does design mediate relationships between individuals, communities, environments, and territories?

• How do political and economic structures influence the production and transformation of place?

• How are questions of power, ownership, access, exclusion, and representation expressed through the design of place?

• How might Indigenous philosophies and situated knowledges challenge established Western conceptions of place?

• What implications do environmental transformation and climate change have for theories and practices of place?

• How do technological systems and digital environments alter relationships between place, spatiality, and experience?

• How might design practices respond to displacement, migration, dispossession, and contested territories?

• What methodological approaches can design contribute to philosophical and interdisciplinary research into place?

• How can creative and practice-based research generate knowledge concerning the conditions of place?

• What responsibilities arise when design intervenes in places with established cultural, historical, ecological, and social relations?

• How might changing conditions require established theories of place and design to be reconsidered?

The symposium welcomes theoretical and philosophical papers alongside historical, empirical, methodological, and practice-based research. Contributions may engage with particular places, spatial practices, design projects, communities, environments, theoretical traditions, or broader questions concerning the nature and production of place.

Particular consideration will be given to contributions that establish substantive connections between conceptual inquiry and design research or practice, and to work that advances critical approaches to the relationships between place and its material, social, cultural, technological, and environmental conditions.

Please submit an abstract of 150 words outlining the proposed contribution, its central argument or research question, and its relevance to the conference theme.

Practice-based and creative research submissions may include supporting documentation, images, or links where appropriate.

Deadline: 9 July 2027
Notification: 30 July 2027
Full papers/artefacts due: 8 October 2027
Symposium: 3 November 2027, RMIT University, Melbourne City Campus
Submission: shaun.wilson@rmit.edu.au