Conferences
Place, AI, and Practice
25-26 June 2027
RMIT University, Melbourne City Campus
This two-day conference will bring together a range of scholars to discuss the role that place designs play through artificial intelligence and creative practice.
Description
Place, AI, and Practice Conference brings together researchers, artists, designers, practitioners, and communities to explore changing relationships between place and artificial intelligence.
The conference considers how AI is influencing the ways we understand, experience, imagine, and represent the places around us, and how this in turn impacts our sense of place. It asks what happens when computational systems encounter the particularities of lived environments, local knowledge, memory, culture, and community.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach to place research, the conference creates opportunities for exchange across research and practice. Through talks, conversations, creative work, and experimental approaches, Place, AI, and Practice will examine the possibilities and challenges that emerge as AI becomes increasingly involved in how places are understood and made.
Call for papers
Topos Lab invites researchers, artists, designers, practitioners, and scholars to contribute up to 25-minute presentations that explore the intersections between place, AI, and practice,
We are particularly interested in contributions that approach questions such as, but not limited to:
How does AI represent particular places, communities, and environments?
What happens to local knowledge when place is translated into data?
How are artists and designers using AI to work with place?
How might creative practice expose the assumptions embedded in AI systems?
What new forms of place-making might emerge through AI?
How do AI-generated images, text, maps, models, or environments shape perceptions of place?
What happens to memory, identity, atmosphere, and lived experience when place becomes computational?
How can practice provide new methods for researching relationships between AI and place?
What are the social, cultural, environmental, and political implications of AI-mediated representations of place?
We are open to academic papers, creative practice, visual works, demonstrations, experimental presentations, and other forms of situated inquiry. Contributions that cross disciplinary boundaries are particularly encouraged.
The conference asks how we might understand AI through the places where it operates and the practices that make it meaningful. This includes attention to the material conditions of AI, the data and infrastructures that support it, and the communities whose places and knowledge become part of computational systems.
We invite contributions that do more than describe these relationships. We are interested in work that makes, tests, questions, or experiments with them.
Submission
Please submit an abstract of 150 words outlining your proposed contribution, including its relationship to place, AI, and practice. Creative and practice-based submissions may include supporting images, documentation, or links where appropriate.
Deadline: 18 December 2026
Notification: 1 February 2027
Full papers due: 8 June 2027
Conference: 1-2 July, RMIT University
Submission: shaun.wilson@rmit.edu.au
Registration: Humantix
A selection of papers will be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed edited collection or journal special issue. Further publication details will be announced.
Designing Place in a Changing World
6 December 2027
RMIT University Melbourne City Campus
This one-day symposium explores the nature of place through rapid transformation, crisis, and change.
Description
The Designing Place in a Changing World symposium examines the philosophical, cultural, material, and political conditions through which places are experienced and transformed. It will consider design as a significant mode of engagement with place, encompassing the production of spatial, material, visual, technological, and social environments.
The symposium provides an interdisciplinary forum for scholars and practitioners working across design, philosophy, architecture, geography, urbanism, anthropology, ethnography, environmental humanities, cultural studies, and related fields. Contributions may address theoretical, historical, empirical, methodological, or practice-based questions concerning the relationship between place and design.
Call for papers
We invite researchers, designers, architects, artists, philosophers, practitioners, and scholars to contribute papers and presentations of up to 25 minutes addressing the relationship between place, design, and contemporary conditions of change.
The conference is particularly concerned with the following questions:
How has the concept of place been formulated within philosophical and theoretical traditions?
What ontological and epistemological questions arise from the relationship between place and design?
How does design participate in the constitution, representation, and transformation of place?
What constitutes a place, and through what relations does place acquire meaning?
How do embodiment, perception, memory, affect, identity, and belonging inform experiences of place?
How do materiality and spatiality contribute to the constitution of place
How are histories and cultural practices inscribed within designed environments?
How does design mediate relationships between individuals, communities, environments, and territories?
How do political and economic structures influence the production and transformation of place?
How are questions of power, ownership, access, exclusion, and representation expressed through the design of place?
How might Indigenous philosophies and situated knowledges challenge established Western conceptions of place?
What implications do environmental transformation and climate change have for theories and practices of place?
How do technological systems and digital environments alter relationships between place, spatiality, and experience?
How might design practices respond to displacement, migration, dispossession, and contested territories?
What methodological approaches can design contribute to philosophical and interdisciplinary research into place?
How can creative and practice-based research generate knowledge concerning the conditions of place?
What responsibilities arise when design intervenes in places with established cultural, historical, ecological, and social relations?
How might changing conditions require established theories of place and design to be reconsidered?
The symposium welcomes theoretical and philosophical papers alongside historical, empirical, methodological, and practice-based research. Contributions may engage with particular places, spatial practices, design projects, communities, environments, theoretical traditions, or broader questions concerning the nature and production of place.
Submission
Please submit an abstract of 150 words outlining the proposed contribution, its central argument or research question, and its relevance to the conference theme.
Practice-based and creative research submissions may include supporting documentation, images, or links where appropriate.
Deadline: 9 July 2027
Notification: 30 July 2027
Full papers/artefacts due: 8 October 2027
Symposium: 6 December 2027, RMIT University
Submission: shaun.wilson@rmit.edu.au
Registration: Humantix
A selection of papers will be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed edited collection or journal special issue. Further publication details will be announced.