30 April: fyi -- phd funding, Milan

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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 info@densitydesign.org

Index of April 2013 | Index of year: 2013 | Full index