Peer reviews: Arife Dila Demir and Nesli Hazal Oktay

Peer-reviewing of Art and Design PhD students Arife Dila Demir and Nesli Hazal Oktay will take place on Monday, February 20, at 10.00-15.30 (GMT+2) in the Estonian Academy of Arts, auditorium A501.
The peer review events will be in a hybrid format. Please find the Zoom link to participate HERE (Passcode: 054867).

Schedule
10.00–10.15 Coffee
10.15–10.30 Welcoming words
10.30–12.00 Arife Dila Demir’s Peer Review
Peer reviewers: Dr. Claudia Núñez-Pacheco & Dr. Michaela Honauer
12.00–14.00 Break for Lunch
14.00–15.30 Nesli Hazal Oktay’s Peer Review
Peer reviewers: Dr. Oscar Tomico & Dr. Verena Fuchsber

4th year PhD student Arife Dila Demir will present her third design case study titled Pain Creature.

Dila is working in the fields of interactive textiles, somaesthetics, soma design and embodied engagements. In her doctoral studies, she explores how interactive wearable textiles can facilitate the somaesthetic awareness (bodily sensory awareness) of bodily discomforts. She defines bodily discomforts as embodied events that disrupt the everyday flow of the bodies such as migraine, fibromyalgia, depression or chronic pain and in her project she specifically works with musculoskeletal chronic pain. In her third case study titled Pain Creature she explores how may soma extensions (interactive wearables that mediate sound-motion-touch interactions) be designed to address the changing needs of the bodies in chronic pain? In doing so, Dila designed Pain Creature informed by the different reflections of her chronic pain experience. The artifact consists of five components that represent the five qualities of chronic pain with different visual, sonic and touch expressions. In her third case study, she lived with Pain Creature interacting with it whenever she needed without any time restrictions. As a result, three notions emerged to be considered when designing for temporal bodily experiences. These are 1) moving through pains, 2) listening to pains and 3) thinking with pains. In her third peer review event, Dila will present the design and making process of Pain Creature as well as the results of her study.

Reviewers:
Dr. Claudia Nuñez-Pacheco, KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Dr. Michaela Honauer, Universiteit Twente, the Netherlands
Supervisors:
Dr. Nithikul Nimkulrat, OCAD University, Canada
Dr. Kristi Kuusk, Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonia

3rd year PhD student Nesli Hazal Oktay will present her second design case study titled Intimacy with Far-away Bodies.

Nesli is working in the fields of interaction design, intimacy, and embodied engagements. In her doctoral studies, she designs close-to-body engagements for people who are close by heart but physically apart. Our bodies can play a significant role in maintaining and nourishing intimacy. In remote connections, the bodies are geographically separated, so intimacy is experienced remotely without shared physicality of the bodies. In this light, Nesli’s explores in which ways close-to-body engagements extend the sense of intimacy in remote connections. More specifically in her second design case study titled Intimacy with Far-away Bodies, Nesli supports the access to the felt experiences of people who experience remote intimacy. She illustrates her design research exploration from her remote intimacy experiences that are grounded within her-sense making attempts as a daughter and a designer. Intimacy with Far-away Bodies unfolds in three phases: i) transforming agar, glycerin, and water into rings with her father; ii) wearing the ring in their everyday lives; and iii) stumbling upon data. Stumbling upon data is the result of eliciting their first-and-second person felt experiences of phases one (i) and two (ii) through photography, self-reporting and interview. In her second peer review event, Nesli will present the design process and findings of Intimacy with Far-away Bodies as well as the plans for her third case.

Reviewers:
Dr. Oscar Tomico, ELISAVA School of Design and Engineering, Spain & Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Dr. Verena Fuchsberger, University of Salzburg, Austria

Supervisors:
Dr. Kristi Kuusk, Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonia
Prof. Danielle Wilde, Umeå University, Sweden and University of Southern Denmark, Denmark