When design designs children and childhoods
Join this event to hear Professor Spyros Spyrou problematise the notion of design in childhood studies and to suggest that it can serve as an interesting entry point into discussions of ontology in childhood.

Spyros will focus in particular on ‘ontological design’, a theory of design that is increasingly discussed in critical design studies but has not as yet, in any substantive way, informed discussions in critical childhood studies.
Ontological design assumes that design has ontological effects—it shapes, in other words, our worlds by designing back our ways of being.
Applied to children and childhood, ontological design suggests that the means through which we design childhoods (through products, services, policies, technologies, discourses, etc) end up designing back children and childhoods.
In this way, and without dismissing the agentic role of children in the world, ontological design alerts us about the powerful role of design in shaping children’s subjectivities and experiences of the world and ultimately the kinds of childhoods that they inhabit. Simultaneously, it pinpoints the potential for design to serve other ontological purposes and ways of being for children. The ethics and politics of design surface, in this context, as paramount.
The event will be particularly useful for those interested in childhood studies and sociology of childhood.
Related links
Professor Spyros Spyrou
Professor of Anthropology and Sociology
European University Cyprus
His books include 'Disclosing Childhoods: Research and Knowledge Production for a Critical Childhood Studies, Children and Borders' and 'Reimagining Childhood Studies', and some of his recent research focuses on young climate activists.