Hi All,

I would like to inform you about a PhD research proposal by the DensityDesign Research Lab at the Design Department at Politecnico di Milano, regarding the recent Call for Applications for PhD positions at the Politecnico.

Focus of the proposal is “Communication Design and the Computational Turn in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Tools, Methods, Interfaces” and its aim is to investigate the contribution that communication and interface design can bring into the definition of new research methods and practices within the emerging intersections between digital technologies, humanities and social sciences.
The PhD student could be part of the DensityDesign Lab in Milan, taking advantage of well established collaborations with researchers and organizations in both humanities and social sciences fields.

PhD student positions at Politecnico are salaried positions for up to three years.
Deadline for application is May 24 and the PhD programme will start in November, 2013.


Here an abstract of the proposal:

The rise of social media along with the recent progress in computational tools that can process massive amounts of data, makes possible fundamentally new approaches for the study of human beings, culture and society. Both humanities and social sciences are today presented with new opportunities to study social and cultural processes and dynamics through and on digital media. Besides the study of non­-digital objects and phenomena with the help of computers, there is a continuously expanding space of cultural production and social interaction riddled by machine mediation, which has been, from the beginning, tied to digital schemes and formats. Traditional cultural artifacts like books or movies, ‘native’ digital forms such as software programs, online publications or computer games, contribute to a growing mountain of data begging to be analysed. Within these contexts, the design of visualizations and interfaces to access, observe and explore these new data emerges as a central issue in current research initiatives and agendas. Furthermore, social sciences and humanities provide an almost­perfect context for design (especially communication and interface design) and design thinking to apply and study their situated, interpretative and user­-centered approaches. Stemming from these considerations and looking at design as a valid interlocutor for the definition of new methods and practices for digital research in the humanities and the social sciences, the research aims at defining new design methods and tools based on the study and the exploitation of digital environments and data.

A complete description of the research proposal can be found here:
http://phd.design.polimi.it/ricerca/temi-di-ricerca-proposti/372-communication-design-and-the-computational-turn-in-the-humanities-and-social-sciences-tools-methods-interfaces

The official Politecnico PhD call:
http://www.ricerca.polimi.it/index.php?id=4731

More information about the DensityDesign Lab can be found here:
http://www.densitydesign.org/


For any further information, please write to [log in to unmask]


Best regards,

Giorgio Caviglia
Postdoc Research Fellow
DensityDesign Research Lab
Design Department
Politecnico di Milano
www.densitydesign.org



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