Conference
TECHNO
GEOGRAPHIES
OF CARE
Future Healthspaces
09—11 October 2025
Faculty of Architecture
and the Built Environment
TU Delft. Berlagezaal
ABOUT
How do we care—through buildings, systems, and code?
In a world shaped by climate urgency, platforms, and aging infrastructures, care is no longer just a practice—it’s a design question.
On October 09, 10 and 11 the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft will host an international conference on the topic of care and caring in a digital age. From homes and hospitals to platforms and planetary systems, care today unfolds across physical and digital infrastructures alike. What kinds of spaces—architectural, virtual, political—does this create?
With architects, scholars, nurses, technologists, and students in conversation, the conference opens up the design of health—not just as a space, but as a network of care.
WHO CARES?
As care becomes digitalized we must not lose sight of the fact that who performs care work is a deeply political question. In a society where the demand for care is growing, technological solutions are often seen as the only viable answer. Yet caring is a set of complex, nuanced processes that require deeper understanding.
Will robots look after our aging parents? Should sick children play with digital pets? Who - or what - provides care matters profoundly, because it ultimately shapes what care becomes.
Image Credit: An intensive care unit in a hospital. Oil painting by R. Priseman, 2004.
Source: Wellcome Collection.
WHERE IS CARE?
Care practices today are both centralized and decentralized, increasingly occurring online and supported by a diverse range of digital infrastructures and actors. These shifts make it harder to pinpoint where care actually happens — is it in the cloud, in clinics, or in chatrooms? More importantly, why does this matter? The question of where care takes place has never been more relevant, especially for architects and designers who are charged with imagining and shaping spaces that can support good care in a changing world.
Image Credit: A mother and child in a maternity ward. Acrylic painting, 1962.
Source: Wellcome Collection.
HOW DO WE CARE?
With care geographies expanding to include a growing array of technologies, the ways we provide and experience care are also evolving. These technologies do more than support caregivers in their daily tasks — they actively shape and re-script what care looks like in new and often unfamiliar ways.
Today, care workers increasingly view technology as a partner. Whether it's diagnostics, surgery, or routine patient care, we now depend on algorithms and digital infrastructures more than ever before.
Image Credit: Mechanical man. Bill McConkey.
Source: Wellcome Collection.
TECHNOGEOGRAPHIES OF CARE
We borrow the term 'technogeographies of care' from Nelly Oudshoorn, who used it to capture how technologies "create interdependencies and distribute dependancies between people, places and technical devices" and "connect previously distinct places (...) creating new sites where care takes place".
The conference theme seeks to critically engage with these new sites, asking where to care well in a digital age?
Image Credit: Nail schizophrene.
Source: Wellcome Collection.
SPEAKERS
PROGRAM
VENUE
Berlagezaal
TU Delft, BK
Julianalaan 134
2628BL Delft
The Netherlands
Beyond Health: Technogeographies of care
Registration website for Beyond Health: Technogeographies of careBeyond Health: Technogeographies of caren.kooijmans@tudelft.nl
Beyond Health: Technogeographies of caren.kooijmans@tudelft.nlhttps://www.aanmelder.nl/167325
2025-10-09
2025-10-11
OfflineEventAttendanceMode
EventScheduled
Beyond Health: Technogeographies of careBeyond Health: Technogeographies of care0.00EUROnlineOnly2019-01-01T00:00:00Z
To be announcedTo be announced