Call for Practitioners for the Workshop “Experiments Monitoring the Everyday: Art, Design, and DIY Methods for Environmental Health Research in STS”

4S Conference
October 9 – 12, 2013
San Diego, California

Exploring the question of how to make environmental health hazards perceptible, we invite participation in an interdisciplinary hands-on, half-day workshop on emerging methods for environmental monitoring in science and technology studies. In particular we highlight methods that engage with critical making through art, design, and DIY practices. Taking the site of the conference as our space for investigation, we will use low-tech monitoring contraptions to investigate the environmental health of ourselves and our classroom and we will learn through experience about the epistemological potential of investigating everyday spaces for potential pollutants. This workshop will be linked to a panel entitled: Making Environmental Harm Manifest.

A DIY kit from The Public Laboratory helps analyze materials and contaminants.

The workshop will have four parts:
1) Introduction: There will be a short introduction of pre-existing monitoring approaches from art, design, and DIY disciplines. This will build on the earlier Panel Presentation Making Environmental Harm Manifest connected to this workshop. This can include anything from infrared scanners hooked up to laptops to using our own bodies to adjudicate air quality.
2) Small group work implementing different investigation methods: groups will spend time creating an on-the-spot field guide to the room we are in, making its hidden elements manifest and open to interpretation using DIY, art, or design devices. Group members will then create a representation of their findings to share with other groups.
3) Roundtable Discussion: Participants will come together and present their findings to the group, and report back the experiences of using their devices to investigate their surroundings.
4) Documentation and Follow-up: Workshop organizers will document the proceedings and representations to create a full field guide for potential exhibition and/or publication.

If you have a monitoring device or a project idea you’d like to have groups experiment with in the workshop, please send a brief (3-6 sentence) expression of interest and description of the device, as well as a short 250-word bio or CV to co-organizers Max Liboiron max.liboiron@nyu.edu and Sara Wylie s.wylie@neu.edu by March 1, 2013. Please put “4S Workshop” in the heading. We will then submit our workshop to 4S. If the workshop is accepted, we will send out a call for participation in the workshop as a whole. Note that this is not yet the call to participate in the workshop as a device-user, but for people or groups who have devices for monitoring environmental health.