Participation is a research area of sustained interest to the HCI community. As HCI is an interdisciplinary field, there are multiple understandings of what participation in research might mean, from subjects and disciplines such as social science, participatory and performance arts, international development, and action research.
Full papers due July 31, 2013.
Call for Papers: Special Issue of the Int. Journal of Human-Computer Studies – Perspectives on participatory HCI research: Beginnings, middles and endings.
Full call: http://di.ncl.ac.uk/participation/special-issue/
Spreadable Media, by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, maps fundamental changes taking place in our contemporary media environment, a space where corporations no longer tightly control media distribution and many of us are directly involved in the circulation of content.
The authors introduce the concept of “spreadability” to describe the ways content travels through social media.
If you don’t have the time to read the book you can listen to a discussion about it from SXSW Interactive 2013.
Authors: Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green
Publisher: NYU Press, 2013.
Read more: http://www.amazon.com/Spreadable-Media-Creating-Networked-Postmillennial/dp/0814743501
Beyond WikiLeaks opens a space to reflect on the broader implications across political and media fields, and on the transformations that result from new forms of leak journalism and transparency activism.
A select group of renowned scholars, international experts, and WikiLeaks ‘insiders’ discuss the consequences of the WikiLeaks saga for traditional media, international journalism, freedom of expression, policymaking, civil society, social change, and international politics.
Edited by Benedetta Brevini, Arne Hintz and Patrick McCurdy
Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=637302
Authors include: Harvard University’s Yochai Benkler; Graham Murdoch of Loughborough University; net activism scholar, Gabriella Coleman; the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jillian York; and Guardian editor, Chris Elliott. The book also includes a conversation between philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and its prologue is written by Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Icelandic MP and editor of the WikiLeaks video ‘Collateral Murder’.
This collection of essays, the first book-length treatment of its kind, explicates the concept of “media interventions” herein defined as activities and projects that secure, exercise, challenge or acquire media power for tactical and strategic action.
Edited by Kevin Howley w. afterword by Nick Couldry.
Published by Peter Lang, 2013.
MORE – Drawing on insights from media, communication and cultural studies, contributors offer penetrating analyses of media interventions in a variety of social, political, and cultural settings from culture jamming and DIY media, to public relations campaigns and reality television shows. In doing so, the volume develops an analytical framework for examining the complex and contradictory operation of media power in contemporary society.
In recent years studies of aesthetic, urban and digital culture have focused on the political potential of user-driven production often referred to by means of concepts such as DIY urbanism and participatory culture, co-creation, produsage, etc. How do we understand and support collective creation, and what new challenges does this change bring forth?
Abstracts due June 20, 2013.
RETHINK Participatory Cultural Citizenship – When is citizen participation socially transformative? Aarhus University (AU), Denmark, Nov 14-16, 2013.
“In Digital Disconnect, Robert McChesney offers a groundbreaking critique of the Internet, urging us to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.”
Author: Robert McChesney, professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and previous host of Media Matters.
Publisher: The New Press, 2013.
Full details: http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Disconnect-Capitalism-Internet-Democracy/dp/1595588671
Convergence has become a buzzword, referring on the one hand to the integration between computers, television, and mobile devices or between print, broadcast, and online media and on the other hand, the ownership of multiple content or distribution channels in media and communications.
Yet while convergence among communications companies has been the major trend in the neoliberal era, the splintering of companies, de-convergence, is now gaining momentum in the communications market. As the first comprehensive attempt to analyze the wave of de-convergence of the global media system in the context of globalization, this book makes sense of those transitions by looking at global trends and how global media firms have changed and developed their business paradigm from convergence to de-convergence.
Author: Dal Yong Jin, Simon Fraser University
Publisher: Routledge, 2013
Book details: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415623438/
Today’s global recession forces design practice, research and education to address questions such as how design can stimulate sustainable economic growth. The Cumulus conference is intended to act as platform for sharing ideas and concepts about contemporary design research in this age of austerity.
Abstracts due May 31, 2013.
November 7-9, 2013, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland. http://www.cumulusdublin.com
Today’s global recession forces design practice, research and education to address a number of questions:
We propose that in the deepest recession since the great depression of the 1930s we need to turn the modernist mantra ‘less is more’ on its head as the reduced budgets of governments, business and people demand ‘more for less’, and develop a ‘New Deal’ for design.
Design Research Society recently published a massive collection of open-access papers that were presented at the DRS 2012 Bangkok conference. It stretches over more than 2000 pages…
… but here are a few articles that cought my attention (with direct links to the paper on Scribd):
Co-creating with Companies: A design led process of learning, by Alessandro Deserti and Francesca Rizzo, Politecnico Di Milano.
Sustainability by Do-It-Yourself Product Design: User design opposing mass consumption, by Janwillem Hoftijzer, University of Twente.
Designing Experimental Urban Mapping with Locative Social Media, by Andrew Morrison, Institute of Design, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, et al.
Bonus: Medea’s Anna Seravallis Bangkok paper Building Fabriken: Design for Socially Shaped Innovation.
The Guardian recently published an interview with author and “anti-solutionist” Evgeny Morozov whose second book To Save Everything, Click Here just hit the bookstores.
Author: Evgeny Morozov
Publisher: Public Affairs, 2013.
BOOK BLURB: In the very near future, “smart” technologies and “big data” will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such “solutionism” affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily manageable matters of technological efficiency? What if some such problems are simply vices in disguise? What if some friction in communication is productive and some hypocrisy in politics necessary? The temptation of the digital age is to fix everything—from crime to corruption to pollution to obesity—by digitally quantifying, tracking, or gamifying behavior. But when we change the motivations for our moral, ethical, and civic behavior we may also change the very nature of that behavior. Technology, Evgeny Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement—but only if we keep solutionism in check and learn to appreciate the imperfections of liberal democracy. Some of those imperfections are not accidental but by design.
Arguing that we badly need a new, post-Internet way to debate the moral consequences of digital technologies, To Save Everything, Click Here warns against a world of seamless efficiency, where everyone is forced to wear Silicon Valley’s digital straitjacket.