Welcome to my creative space. I am Dila, here I share the things I make and explore. I hope you will find something inspiring.
Design Space
Teachings & Workshops & Reviewing
Teachings
Course Name: Embodied Research: From Autobiography to Participatory ApproachesCurriculum: PhD Level
Course Content: The course introduces the application of body-based research methods from autobiography to participatory design approaches. It focuses on how felt experiences can inform the creative research processes and how the lived experience of the researcher can be used as a resource in autobiographical-autoethnographic settings and participatory approaches. In doing so, the course will introduce various methods to cultivate and elicit embodied experiences. Situating bodily experiences at the core of a research process calls for more-than-procedural ethical approaches. Accordingly, the course will mediate on the ethic and care concerns in embodied research inspired by feminist care ethics and felt and relational ethics agenda.
Course Name: Book Club for Designers
Curriculum: MA Level
Organizers: Dila Demir & Nesli Hazal Oktay
Course Content: The course aims to introduce design research methods to Design Master's students and encourages them to read different methods and literary texts that inspire these methods. Through this course, students can gain a critical reading and writing practice of academic texts. Each semester the course focuses on a specific methodology , accordingly, the reading includes a methodological and theoretical books about the choosen approach. To provide critical engagement with the reading materials, the course offer reflective writing practices.
Course Name: Somaesthetic Design & Sensory Materials
Curriculum: MA Level
Course Content: The ‘Somaesthetic Design & Sensorial Materials’ course is built on the soma design approach founded by Kristina Höök. The course regards bodily interactions as the interaction between the body and things in the world as well as between the body and the implicit bodily experiences. During this course, students explore the notion of designing for bodily engagements through interacting with their bodily senses. The notion of the sense is not reduced to five senses which are sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch; rather it includes the sense of pain, proprioceptive senses, interoceptive senses, etc. Accordingly, students are invited to engage with their sensory bodily experiences through autobiographic/autoethnographic design processes to design for sensory bodily engagements and sensory bodily materials.
Course Name: Somaesthetic Interactions & Soma Design
Curriculum: BA Level
Course Content: As part of the 'Design Theory' course, I gave a lecture on Somaesthetic Interactions and Soma Design which was followed by a seminar. The main task of the seminar was to experience some of the soma design methods and discuss the main reading material in relation to these experienced methods.
Course Name: Sensorial Design: E-Textile Workshop
Curriculum: BA & MA Level
Organizers: Dila Demir & Kristi Kuusk
Course Content: Intense workshop on e-textiles in the context of sensorial design. The course introduces the basic materials used in soft electronics and their possible application methods within the sensorial design. The sensorial design considers how to design for human sensory experience and raise somaesthetic awareness through it?
Course Name: Peformative Textiles in the Context of Sound and Movement
Curriculum: MA Level
Course Content: The course conducted in the master’s curriculum of four universities in Tallinn, art and design students Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA), HCI group from Tallinn University, choreography and dance students from Baltic Film, Media and Arts School, and music students from Estonian Music and Theather Academy. The course investigates how to connect sound, textile, technology, and bodily interactive performances for socially positive impact. In this collaborative course, my role was to conduct e-textile workshops and mentor students. Based on EKA, I took role as a e-textile instructor conducting e-textile workshops and supervised group projects.
Workshops
Title of the Workshop: Conquering the silence, exploring the uncomfortable together: a collective exploration of discomfort as a design materialOrganizers: Kristina Popoca, Joo Young Park, Arife Dila Demir
Hosting Organization:Nordic Design Research Society Conference (NORDES 2023)
Place & Year: Norrköping, Sweden / June 2023
Workshop Content: The workshop is focused on social aspects of discomfort. There are two sides of the exploration. We are interested in whether collaborative activity can help us to accept and find enjoyment in the discomfort that is already present in our bodies. We are also interested in social discomfort emerging from engaging into non-habitual activities and the aspects of interaction that usually remain unspoken.
The purposes of this exploration are: to (1) explore discomfort in social context (2) use discomfort to build a novel way of interacting with each other in a way that is based on care for inherent vulnerabilities of our bodies rather than the ideas of autonomy, competition and invincibility (3) Exploring the elicitation techniques and their role in design.
Title of the Workshop: Designing with the Body in Unhabitual Movements
Organizers: Arife Dila Demir, Joo Young Park, Claudia Núñez-Pacheco, Marianela Ciolfi Felice
Hosting Organization:Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interactions Conference (TEI’23)
Place & Year: Warsaw, Poland / February 2023
Workshop Content: The goal of this studio is to explore the qualities of unhabitual body movements to inform the design of close-to-the-body touch technologies. After engaging with unhabitual kinesthetic activities, we will use visual and textual elicitation tools to communicate emerging felt sensations. We propose the use of photography as an open-ended visual medium and a repertoire of textural metaphors as a textual tool - a vocabulary list of felt qualities that will be extended through the participants’ contribution. We will then collectively explore how these expressions of felt sensations can be translated into concrete design elements via tangible design ideation and making.
Reviewing
Master’s Thesis Reviews
Katrin Kirsikka Janelle Koskela, (2023), Wear My Anger, Interaction Design, Estonian Academy of Arts
Quinn Feller, (2023), Mending Relationships: repairing our garments through playfullness and collaboration, Interaction Design, Estonian Academy of Arts
Sunil Sudevan, (2023), Mediating Touch Through Vibrotactile Display in the Context of Public Speaking, School of Digital Technologies, Human-Computer-Interaction, Tallinn University
Conference Reviews
AOR 2023 (Art of Research)
DIS 2022 (Designing Interactive Systems)