Due to its unparalleled and uninterrupted market success within the ever-growing global consumer societies, IKEA has emerged as a major player in shaping human self-definition through the staged living environments present in its department stores and media channels alike, filled with branded products, as well as visions of attractive lifestyles that inundate its audience’s perception and mold their ideals of homeynes. As a manifestation of desire-driven aesthetic capitalism and the accompanying design culture, IKEA has attained its prominent present status not only through the products themselves but most notably through the associated narratives and imagery, which shape powerfully the social imagination about desirable housing conditions and the decent ways of dwelling. This paper begins with a critical analysis of a special issue of the visual-discoursive survey IKEA has conducted for a decade under the title Life at Home Report, it then focuses on the concept of aesthetic labor, which operates as the hidden and ambivalent foundation of what IKEA propagates in its offers for a better everyday life. The paper claims that taking seriously the aesthetic appreciation and the actively pursued aesthetic practices by the dwellers, sometimes summed up in the concept of prosuming, is fundamental to understanding how a home is constituted in the felt experience. Additionally, the article explores some of the consequences all these do or might exert on the production side and theory.

10-12. February, 2025
Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest

Editorial Introduction: "Some Drawdowns from the Well of Design Culture"

The relation between disability and design is conceived more often than not as a one-way and necessary consequentiality: the former is taken as the problem, the latter as the solution (even if partial). In this division of roles a paradoxical dialectic works: design gets a substantial confirmation of being the problem-solver as such by the very fact that disability (either conceived according to medical or social model) is accounted for as a problem. And a wicked one, for that matter. For that very reason, design, when it follows its mission in the most responsible way, considers not only functional, sensory, and locomotive impairment or mental incapability, but the social handicap, legal and political inequality, economic and labor market hindrance as well, seeing all those as an amalgam of challenges. Not refusing the potential and actual benefits our societies had or could gain from the operations of design as problem-solving, I am contending in my talk that a reversal of the formula would also lead to beneficial outcomes for the greater good of everyone. To articulate this position one should raise some questions: what might design learn from the differently abled people and disability culture in general? How can design meet its own limitations? From what perspective does design prove to be 'disabled'? Thanks to a proliferation of more or less good examples both in the academia and the market sector, design examples can pop up in an endless row in one’s mind when it comes to enumerate the possible creative approaches towards the goals of furthering personal self-determination, social participation, and sheer bodily capacities. My aim is not just to confirm or laud some of them but critically assess as well. What Liz Jackson calls "disability ingenuity" seems to me a much more important and forward-looking phenomenon than the whole plethora of "disability design" produced many times by emerging designers seeking attention. I believe this, because Jackson’s concept applies not only on the socio-economic sector under the umbrella term of 'disability' but includes great potential also for the wider and more general social life.

The aim of this track is to reconsider, reconceptualize, and challenge the everyday belief that modern design improves the quality of life, including its mental, psychological, somatic, interpersonal and environmental dimensions. We call for contributions that either judiciously analyse the overly optimistic expectations that surround modern and contemporary design, or provide reconfigurations of the position, status and use of design for the sake of human dignity, health, well-being, and interpersonal relationships. We aim to delve into the intricate connections between the body, social structure, communities and the urban sphere in terms of health, sickness and the “standardized” body vis-a-vis design theory and practice.

Design permeates every dimension of our lifeworld, from the products we consume and the built environments in which we live to the adorned and stylized beings that we are and the natural preserves where we seek relief from the stressful bustle of urban life. Design is where contrasting values of functionality and aesthetic pleasure converge. At the core of design is the human soma, an active, perceptive subjectivity that creates and evaluates design but is also its cultivated product. This collection of ten essays explores the somaesthetics of design in multiple fields: from ritual, craft, and healthcare to architecture, urbanism, and the new media of extended realities.

Budapest, Moholy-Nagy University of Art & Design, 11-13 May 2023

15.10.2021 Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Art, Krakow

In the last two decades, research on the arts showed that the perspective provided by somaesthetics could highly contribute to the efforts of rethinking artistic practices and the aesthetic experience in general (Shusterman 2014; Journal of Somaesthetics vol. 1-7). In addition, somaesthetic perspective helped also to re-conceptualize the social impacts art exerts (Ryynänen 2015), viewing those from different angles than the ones provided by the sociology of art (Luhman 2000), relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 2002), participation theories (Bishop 2012) or the anthropology of culture (Pfeiffer). Taking part in these efforts, in an earlier study (Veres 2014) I suggested taking architecture as the best model for a somaesthetically oriented scrutiny of the arts and conceiving it as the main point of orientation throughout the aesthetic field. However, given that aesthetic phenomena are countless and infinite, I fully admit the model provided by architecture might seem less explanatory with regards to the somaesthetic aspects of intensely performative creative practices, like dance, music or theatre play, and all the human activities, which are relevant aesthetically but do not have the status of art. What directly connects architectural structures to the overall Lebenswelt in an encompassing experience is the dimension of audibility that comes with every kinesphere, most notably in the public space and the multifarious sites of human residency. This presentation shall provide some critical comments for a somaesthetically conscious and acoustically sensitive architectural planning.

25-28 May 2022, Moholy-Nagy University of Art&Design, Budapest

homepage: pae30.mome.hu

06-08. 05. 2019., Budapest, Moholy-Nagy University of Art&Design