The iMEMA team promoted the research project "Let's Get SMART - The research project of sense-making and art" in which we explore how children of different ages build meaning in artworks and things that are important to them. Our recruiting station at the weekend of science hosted by the Zpannend Zernike displayed through two activities: (1) The Emotional Twister, where kids can make combinations of objects, emotions, sensations, and thoughts by using the timeless family game rules, and (2) An Expression Recognizer using AI face detection in Pictoblox where children could understand the importance of video recording in our research. This helped the visitors to our booth understand the methods and the goal of the research. 

Every person interprets art differently, yielding a unique significance for each individual. The purpose of this study is to better understand the ways in which children, adolescents, and adults of different ages find and shape the meaning of objects that resonate deeply with them, things that we consider works of art. 

During this ongoing research project, we asked participants to invite a peer (friend, family member, or colleague) to co-participate with them in the experiment. Then, we will ask each participant to choose and bring one item of choice. More specifically, the researchers will give instructions to bring something meaningful (one item) that is important to the participant. The participants first answer pre-questionnaires about their experience of the artworks, then talk (the conversation will be of a maximum of 20 min) about their selections, and lastly answer again post-questionnaires. 

The interdisciplinary symposium "The art of experiencing" (Dutch: De kunst van het ervaren) has been organized in collaboration between the University of Groningen and That Bolwerck Art and Thoughts (Dutch: Dat Bolwerck) in honor of the farewell of Vincent Peppelenbosch. 

Whether emotion, rapture, alienation, or disruption, art evokes reactions in one's body and interaction with emotions. The symposium explored how art moves something in the spectator through a series of lectures and by active participation in data collection for presentation purposes. 

The research team empirically measured the experiences of participants towards selected artworks of the exhibition "You are all stardust". Preliminary visualization of the data collected has been addressed in a plenary discussion, resulting in a thought-provoking conversation between art lovers, experts, and academics. 

The research team set up a pop-up lab in the Frankfurt Art Association (German: Frankfurter Kunstverein, FKV), an art museum located in Frankfurt so as to have a natural and ecologically valid setting of art experience. 

Visitors were invited to wear a smartwatch provided by the research team during their visit to the exhibition The Intelligence of Plants – an Alliance of Science and Art, curated by Franziska Nori. It anonymously recorded heart rate, motion-based activity, electrical properties and peripheral temperature of the skin. 

Visitors also had the opportunity to fill in a questionnaire about their reactions to selected artworks in the exhibition. Upon participation, visitors received an illustrative dashboard of the experience reported through the questionnaires.

Despite the number of important philosophical questions posed by design, philosophy of design is itself underdeveloped. Philosophers who write about design tend to do so from the perspective of one or other philosophical domain: usually philosophy of technology or aesthetics.

Unfortunately, these analyses do not in and of themselves constitute a coherent philosophy of design; there is no scholarship systematising these various approaches. All this leaves philosophy of design a rather tragic and piecemeal sort of affair.

Thankfully, this does not indicate the presence of a principled incompatibility between these sub-fields. To the contrary, these disciplines are both useful and mutually reconcilable. This is the groundwork for a philosophy of design. 

This project was awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Senior Researchers in early 2022, and will commence in late 2022.