Pauline van Dongen’s clothing designs take postphenomenology as inspiration, aiming to highlight how materials and technology mediate our experiences in the world. Van Dongen describes her work as merging “use” with “being.” We often use clothes, or simply wear them without second thoughts, but this designer aims to reveal the capability of clothing to mediate…

The synergy between academia and industry has always been productive, innovative, yet frictional.  Pauline Van Dongen, a fashion designer, and Lianne Toussaint, a scholar of media and culture, have been collaboratively working together and mutually inspiring each other with their own specialty. As both “design thinking” and “theory-inspired practices” have been addressed several times in…

Living through various lockdowns and pandemic limitations for over a year now, I have not (either have not been able to or have not dared to) paid a visit to a museum for what seems like a personal record length. Fittingly, Utrecht University research group Subjects in Interdisciplinary Learning (SILT) has crafted a beautiful online…

This week’s TiM seminar addressed notions about serendipity. Serendipity was first defined by British writer Horace Walpole in a letter to indicate the art of discovering phenomena “by accident and sagacity while in pursuit of something else” (Van Andel & Bourcier 2009, 27). In their paper “Interdisciplinary Research Boosted by Serendipity” (2014) Darbellay, Moody, Sedooka…

At the last Transmission in Motion seminar, the participants navigated a virtual museum. By virtually navigating the online platform, participants could interact with different curated positions towards the theme/phenomenon of serendipity. As a word, serendipity describes an aptitude to encounter a positive or valuable object, space, occurrence, etc. My experience with ‘Designing for Serendipity’ (Utrecht…

March 31, 2021, was the day when something quite wonderful happened. Or, one should rather say, serendipitous. Serendipity is a notion that some students might have already had contact with; some students might have encountered this notion for the first time during the seminar session that took place on this day. Serendipity, as originally defined…

At first glance, the phrase ‘designing for serendipity’ comes across as an oxymoron. Serendipity, a situation underscored by chance. Is it possible at all to design for serendipitous encounters? Is there a science behind serendipity? These were some of the questions that rang in my head as we were introduced to the virtual exhibition created…

In contrast to the previous Transmission in Motion sessions, the format for the seminar of March 31st, entitled ‘Designing for Serendipity’, was different. All participants were invited to visit an online museum curated by a few members from SILT (Subjects of Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching). The current exhibition centered around the theme of ‘Serendipity’. A…

The most recent Transmission in Motion seminar was somewhat different from the previous seminars. Really, it actually was not a seminar at all, but rather an online field trip to an online museum exhibition titled “Designing for Serendipity” (Domen et al. 2021), created by members of SILT (Subjects in Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching). The museum…

In the latest TiM seminar, “Designing for Serendipity”, the research group SILT introduced us to their self-built virtual museum, centered around the theme of Serendipity – the unexpected moment of discovery that happens when looking for something else (Darbellay et al. 2014, 2). The museum was divided into thematically curated rooms. In the green room,…