Interfacing the Ocean: Designing from Below is accepting talk submissions on submitcfp. Event date: 2027-03-18. CFP deadline: 2026-09-30. Location: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.
SYMPOSIUM INTERFACING THE OCEAN: DESIGNING FROM BELOW The symposium Interfacing the Ocean: Designing from Below explores how the experience of being underwater can reshape practices of perceiving, knowing, and making. Beyond technological mediation, ‘interfacing’ is understood as a relational condition emerging through underwater immersion, multispecies encounters, and interaction with/in marine environments. The ocean’s specific milieu, so alien to human senses, reconfigures our being in an environment and destabilizes practical and theoretical assumptions developed in a terrestrial milieu. A shift of perspective towards seeing ‘from below’ offers leverage points to reframe design as a less imposing practice, aligning it with the environment in which it is embedded and on which it relies. Accentuating relationality over representation, Interfacing the Ocean strives to unlock epistemic and ontological potentials, both within and beyond contemporary ocean crises and their political, ecological, and societal implications. This call invites researchers from multiple disciplines such as arts, design, anthropology, biology, acoustics, and environmental humanities to share concepts, ideas, and practices deriving from the experience of being in and with marine environments. Being underwater by the means of scuba diving, free diving, and snorkeling stands at the centre of this exchange, as an embodied practice of consciously attuning to more-than-human worlds. Contributions should address one or more of these subject areas: 1. SUBMERGED SENSING How can the experience of being underwater be translated and mediated through practices of submerged sensing? What forms of less extractivist entanglements between terrestrial and oceanic worlds can diving facilitate? Diving is more than an adventure-seeking activity as it opens questions about the role of the diver as an ambassador, shaman, or voyager – a person able to traverse and mediate between terrestrial and aquatic worlds. Central to this mediation are the technologies through which underwater experience becomes communicable to the surface – the camera as a tool for expanding the gaze; the hydrophone as a means of extending the ear to the sea. How do these sensory translations shape what counts as encounter, evidence, or knowledge — and for whom? 2. RELATIONAL DIVING How can diving become a relational attunement practice enabling mindful encounters between humans and the marine environment? What does it mean to design in relation to other perceptive realms that can only be partially inferred? Attending marine worlds reaches beyond human scales and ways of knowing. Underwater in situ mediated extensions, like diving masks, hydrophones, pressure gauges, in-situ microscopy or underwater sampling, help humans to fine-tune their bodies as instruments able to perceive more-than-human and planetary relations. This session invites reflection on planetary timescales and more-than-human epistemological spheres and the partial, participatory nature of sensing itself. It includes noticing the discrepancies and shifts of meaning that derive from prototypes and interfaces with the ocean, seeking to measure, map, and translate more-than-human relations. 3. MAKING FROM BELOW How can practices of making be adapted to the milieu of the sea? And how do underwater practices in turn shape and reconfigure our terrestrial modes of making? The estranging experience that diving offers when practicing in seawater – slow, breath-bound, physically straining – becomes the starting point for questioning habitual ways of designing, which often remain bound to fantasies of human ‘stewardship’ and their colonial and extractive legacies. Making in and with the ocean gives rise to submerged practices that weave together local communities, regional knowledge cultures, and more-than-human marine environments. They embrace open, unpredictable, and reciprocal forms of making and the possibility to explore design as a humble and relational practice. Submission Contributions should address one or several subject areas with a short abstract, responding to the central questions. • Abstract: 500 words • Short Bio: 250 words • Formats: classical long-paper, short paper, experimental presentation or round table discussion • Optional: technical requirements, images, links The drafts for long and short paper are due until February, 1st 2027. Hosted by the SNSF Interfacing the Ocean research group (Zurich University of the Arts), the symposium will take place on 18–19 March 2027 at the Museum für Gestaltung Zurich.
Tracks: SUBMERGED SENSING, RELATIONAL DIVING, MAKING FROM BELOW.
Talk formats: Lightning Talk (10min), Regular Talk (30min), Workshop (60min), Presentation.
Submit your proposal at https://submitcfp.com/cfp/interfacingtheoceandesigningfrombelow.