Living in the Age of Convergences: Affect, Affordance, Agency

Date 9 and 10 December 2019
Venue National Library Singapore, 100 Victoria Street
Convenors Simone Shu-Yeng Chung, Department of Architecture, NUS
Mary Ann NG, Department of Architecture, NUS

This interdisciplinary academic workshop invites scholars and practitioners to critically consider how technological and digital integration has transformed the way we now live, work, interact and think. The workshop specifies a human-centred approach towards understanding the resultant impact of this merging of technologies on our online and offline everyday practices. Perspectives from within Singapore and across Asia are especially welcomed. From a spatial standpoint, we wish to explore how digital affordance, social media and online resources are allowing us to redraw a new spatial rhetoric. For one, the traversality of workers have created new norms that has significantly impacted the labour ecosystem and landscape, reframing a new political economy. The notion of inclusiveness meanwhile is measured by the values valorised by spatially-rounded four-dimensional human beings who are able to effectively capitalise on twenty-first century affordances in mobility and media.

We seek paper proposals that explore this polemical topic via any one of the five themes:
• Collective Consciousness, arising from hyper-connectivity, is instrumental to the formation of universally shared values;
• Values, the intrinsic qualities adopted by those who embrace the greater mobility, freedom and access to opportunities proffered by techno-digital enhancements;
• Technological and digital disruptions that profoundly impact our triadic Work, Life and Education entanglements;
• Taxonomy, utilising innovative means to construct a new compendium of knowledge; and
• The City, demonstrating tangible instances where media interfaces and digital connectivity have enhanced urban experience, navigation and performance.

We welcome abstracts of 250 words maximum in either Word doc or pdf format. Submissions should include the title of the paper, name of author, affiliation, email contact and 100 word short biography. Please send them to millennialnomadspace@gmail.com by Friday 23 August 2019.

Applicants will be notified of the outcome by 1 September 2019. We require accepted speakers to submit a 3,000 word draft of their papers by 30 November to facilitate productive exchange and sharing at the workshop.

This workshop is supported by an MOE Tier 1 AcRF grant for the project Deciphering the Spatial Rhetorics of Millennial Nomads (2019-2020) at the School of Design and Environment, National University of Singapore. Please visit our website at https://millennialnomadspace.com