Harun Kaygan

Research areas

My teaching and research interests lie in the social and cultural aspects and political implications of design practices and objects, with a focus on new materialist frameworks. I have widely published on design cultural subjects including Turkish design, social design and activism, consumer communities.

My current research focuses on the ways design cultural flows cut across human bodies, with case studies in diverse industries such as medical design, exhibition design, consumer goods, public transportation vehicles, and design for children, including playgrounds and education. In my current project, funded by Carlsberg Foundation, we develop a theoretical framework for understanding design as a "somatic expertise:" Designers have increasingly fashioned themselves as professionals concerned with the bodily well-being of their users, within a societal context that is shaped by the neoliberal drives for marketisation and consumer responsibilisation as well as the technological changes that have facilitated their extensive application.

Another of my strong research interests lie in gendered design, where my colleagues and I have been developing an interaction-focused analytical perspective that we use to understand how designed things mediate gendered experiences of variously gendered individuals.