Questions about the status and nature of what we call “things” go back to the very origins of philosophy in most traditions, linked as these questions are to basic philosophical problems regarding being, essence, perception, and the relation of mind or thought to the so-called “external” world. In design, discourse about things has tended to follow a familiar historical trajectory of aesthetics and function, with its focus on the immediate future as demanded by the market. Nonetheless, in the 21st Century both technological advances and the geo-political structures with which these advances are intimately connected have had radical effects on the nature of things, raising challenges for both the ways we think about things, and the ways we approach their design, production and exhibition in these rapidly emerging circumstances.

While technology has enabled a vast increase in the production and proliferation of things, it has also created a new category of thing, the “virtual,” and has even contributed to the disappearance of things taken in the traditional sense through both the introduction of multi-use objects like the smartphone and the connection of things through the Internet of Things (IoT). At the same time environmental degradation, increased commodification, and globalized communication technologies have deeply affected our relation to “things,” while exacerbating ongoing tensions around those that are already invested with deep ethical, cultural and/or artistic significance. Museums and other cultural institutions, for example, are challenged to adapt curatorial and collections practices to new genres of art that eschew materiality even as the colonial legacy of other objects must be renegotiated.

The outset of the 21st Century would thus seem to present not only an occasion but even a demand to rethink the “thing” from a number of perspectives and orientations. In the spirit of collective interdisciplinary scholarly enquiry, this conference proposes as a first step of this rethinking a workshop to bring together an international group of thinkers and practitioners from the fields of philosophy, design, aesthetics, cultural theory and the arts around this problem of “Rethinking the Thing in the 21st Century.”