Designing Cultural Futures: Emerging Technologies, Architecture, and Urban Experience

Background

At the 5th International Conference on Art, Design and Social Sciences, this symposium addresses a fundamental question emerging from the rapid technological and social transformation of cities: how might we design cultural futures that foster meaningful urban experiences? Beyond improving infrastructure or efficiency, the future of urban life lies in creating opportunities for people to connect with culture, heritage, creativity, and one another through engaging and inclusive experiences. Design – including architecture, urban design, interaction design, and experience design – plays a pivotal role in shaping cultural encounters by transforming the built environment into places of participation, reflection, and shared meaning. This transformation is increasingly enabled by emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual, augmented and mixed reality (VR/AR/MR), and spatial computing. Achieving this vision calls for interdisciplinary dialogues that bridge creative practice, technological innovation, and social inquiry to critically explore how emerging technologies can reimagine urban and cultural experiences while responding to contemporary societal challenges.

Goal/Rationale

The rationale of this symposium is grounded in the understanding that the future of cities is not solely a technological or urban question, but fundamentally a cultural, connected, and human-centred one. Design and architecture play complementary roles in shaping that future, not only through the creation of buildings and public spaces, but also through the cultural experiences and encounters they enable.

The symposium asks how design and architecture can intentionally shape cultural futures in urban spaces – both physical and digital – where emerging technologies meaningfully contribute to richer forms of cultural engagement, meaning-making, human connection, and public life. In doing so, it invites critical and creative discussions on how “cultural futures” can be understood in the contemporary context and reimagined as designed experiences, as well as how new architectural, design, and interdisciplinary approaches can be developed to engage with this agenda. Through both theoretical and practice-based contributions, the symposium seeks to foster new ways of thinking, designing, and collaborating toward more engaging, sustainable, and human-centred cultural futures.

Scope

This symposium invites contributions that translate the idea of designing cultural futures into cross-disciplinary research and practices. It welcomes works that explore how design, architecture, and emerging technologies can collectively shape future urban experiences through cultural engagement, participation, and creative practice. Rather than treating these areas as separate domains, the symposium encourages contributions that engage with their intersections in diverse ways, such as empirical research, case studies, critical reflections etc.

Key areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Architecture, urban design, and the built environment in shaping cultural participation, placemaking, and urban experience
• Museums, cultural heritage, and public art as evolving spaces for cultural engagement
• Immersive technologies and AI for designing cultural encounters and civic engagement
• Experience-centred design approaches to create meaningful cultural encounters
• Creative practice and interdisciplinary design approaches that explore new forms of cultural expression, storytelling, and community engagement.
• Design strategies to foster sustainable, inclusive, and culturally vibrant urban futures.

Submissions may take the form of papers, posters, or presentations of completed or work-in-progress research, and should reflect on how they contribute to understanding or reimagining cultural encounters within the broader framing of cultural futures.