Posts tagged call for submissions

Call for Submissions: The Car as an Arena for Gaming (Workshop @MobileHCI, San Francisco)

The car is unique place to be. Gaming in cars, for safety reasons, cannot be like gaming at home, but also not should be. But gaming in cars has the potential, of making use of all the cool properties of the car itself, the practices of driving, and of driving as a socially shared experience.

Due May 25, 2012. The Car as an Arena for Gaming Workshop at MobileHCI 2012, San Francisco, CA, September 21, 2012.

Read full call here: http://workshops.icts.sbg.ac.at/mobilehci2012/index.html

MORE - In this workshop, we aim to gather both practitioners and academics to work out the possibilities and challenges of this design space that to our experience has been slightly forgotten about since Juhlin and colleagues’ excellent work on the Backseat Playground system.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • in-car gaming or driving or traffic as a social experience
  • the car or driving or traffic as a design space for gaming
  • passengers or children in various car related activities
  • safe driving in relation car gaming
  • learnings from game research or the game industry relevant for the topic

Call for Submissions: Making Futures – Challenging Innovation (PDC, Aug 13, Roskilde, Denmark)

In this PDC 2012 workshop, we will challenge the logic of innovation by exploring the potential of participatory design cases that demonstrate a repertoire of differently situated practices of ‘future-making’; futures made locally, in heterogeneous communities, and with marginalised publics. The workshop will focus on map-making and storytelling to form landscapes of multiple futures.

Submissions due June 1, 2012. Participatory Design Conference, Roskilde, Denmark, August 12-16, 2012. Workshop date is August 13.

Participants interested to contribute to the workshop should no later than June 1 announce their intent to the organizers, makingfutures@sand14.com, by sending a short description of your case (2-4 pages).

Full call is available here: http://medea.mah.se/2012/05/pdc2012-workshop-making-futures-challenging-innovation/

CFP: Locative Media - Culture, Economy, Policy (edited volume, abstracts due May 7)

The aim of this edited volume is to bring together a comprehensive account of the various location-based technologies, services, applications, and cultures, as media — and to identify, inventory, explore, and critique their cultural, economic, political, social, and policy dimensions internationally.

Abstracts due May 7, 2012. Locative Media: Culture, Economy, Policy. Edited by Rowan Wilken (Swinburne University of Technology) & Gerard Goggin (University of Sydney).

Location technologies have experienced a relatively long and complex incubation. Satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) commenced life as a military technology before finding its way into wider commercial and consumer uses (not least being used in mobile phones along with triangulation of cellular networks for services such as enhancedemergency calling). Location-based services for cellular mobile networks and devices were the subject of much experiment and anticipation in the 1990s. Mobile social networking applications first emerged in the 1990s, with the celebrated Lovegety gadget in Japan, and pioneering efforts such as Dodgeball in NorthAmerica. Technologies predicated on location also were pieced together through telecommunications, Internet, and web-based friendship, dating, and hooking-up services and sites such as Gaydar.

The early 2000s witnessed a wave of location-based experimentation around location and mobile devices across art, urban design, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and strands of gaming cultures. These experiments included locative art, performances, activist interventions, location-aware fiction, location-based games (famously those of Blast Theory), annotation and story-telling, and a wide range of other manifestations. As mobile phones developed into fully-fledged media devices, various affordances led to new kinds of socio-technical marshalling of location. The ubiquity of camera phones allowed innovative visual and textual instantiations and representations of place. Cross-platform game developments increasingly relied on locative media as a key part of integrated, transmedia forms. Music and sound moved to the foreground of media imaginatively yoked to location.

Towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, two major developments put locative media squarely at the centre of contemporary cultural and social dynamics.

First, new kinds of locative media emerged through the ‘geoweb’ — the combination of the Internet with mapping, place-making, and locational technologies. Since the Google’s embrace of geolocation services in 2005 — with the fascination attracted by Google Earth and Google Maps, mainstream interest in and uptake of locative media services flourished. Such Internet-based locative media increasingly coincided with the widespread diffusion of mobile phone, mobile broadband, wireless Internet, and portable, networked media technologies. Consumers are now well accustomed to using sat nav devices in their cars, or while walking, Google Maps on desktop and laptop computers and mobile devices, and geoweb, geotagging and other mapping applications from all manner of places, and various apps on iPhones and smart phones that use location-aware technologies.

Secondly, with the phenomenal growth of smartphones following the launch of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android plaforms in 2007-2008, the mobile Internet firmly took hold. As inadvertently revealed, smartphones gather unprecedented amounts of longitudinal data on their users’ locations — data which can support new kinds of tailored retail and consumer services, lifestyle profiling and mapping, and surveillance, with considerable privacy and social implications. Such mobile media built on the success of user-generated content and social networking systems (Cyworld, Mixi, Flickr, YouTube, QQ, Renren), and brought the locational aspects of these systems to the fore — especially with extensions such as Facebook Places, iPhoto tagging, and so on. The arrival of apps on smartphones — supported by Apple’s apps store, Google market, Window and Nokia’s shared apps — was also fuelled by the incorporation of locational capacities into this new wave ofmobile computing and software.

In short, not only are locative media one of the fastest growing areas in digital technology, questions of location and location-awareness are increasingly central to our contemporary engagementswith online and mobile media, and indeed media and culture generally. While locative media, especially in its recent North American incarnations, has become an fertile topic for research, policy, and public debate — and the subject of important recent studies such as de Souza e Silva and Frith’s Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces (2012), Gordon and de Souza e Silva’s Net Locality (2011), and Farman’s Mobile Interface Theory (2012) — there are many aspects of the international phenomenon of locative media that need research and critical discussion.

Thus the central aim of the Locative Media collection is to bring together a comprehensive account of the various location-based technologies, services, applications, and cultures, as media — and to identify, inventory, explore, and critique their cultural, economic, political, social, and policy dimensions internationally. In particular, the collection is organized around the perception that the growth of locative media gives rise to a number of crucial, as yet clearly articulated and addressed questions concerning the areas of culture, economy and policy.

Accordingly, we welcome proposals for papers that address any aspect of culture, economy, and policy, and the constitution, functions, and effects of locative media, especially (but certainly not limited to) the following:

  • How do we understand and theorize locative media as media? What are the interactions, affiliations, and remediations, between locative media and other media, especially Internet and mobiles?
  • How have locative media developed? What are their different histories that influence their present forms? What are the cultural, economic, and political economies that have shaped location-basedservices, locative, and geo-media?
  • How do locative media differ across national markets, geo-linguistic communities, and cultural contexts? What are the specificities of locative media in countries and regions that remain understudied in the anglophone literatures?
  • What the contrasting, or shared, meanings or practices associated with locative media in particular societies or groups of users? And what are the particular affordances of locative media in different settings and configurations of the technologies?
  • How have locative media been imagined as a policy object and regulated to date? What are their implications for current and future policy and regulation? In what ways can new frameworks be devised to capture and respond to the challenges of locative media?
  • What are the privacy ramifications oflocative media? What are the new concepts of privacy evolved alongside locative media? How do we understand the important concept of sharing — or its obverse, withholding information, emerging with locative media?
  • What are the implications of locative media are for broader understandings of media and technology? How do locative media fit into with new accounts of media, mobile, and networked publics?

Proposals
Please send proposals to both editors by 7 May 2012: Rowan Wilken (rwilken(at)swin.edu.au) and Gerard Goggin (gerard.goggin(at)sydney.edu.au).

Proposal should include:

  • title
  • abstract of up to 500 words
  • short biographical details for author and affiliation.

Provisional acceptance will be advised by 19 May 2012.

About the editors:
Rowan Wilken (rwilken@swin.edu.au<mailto:rwilken@swin.edu.au>) is Australian Research Council DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) Fellow in the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. His books include Mobile Technology and Place (2012; with Gerard Goggin), and Teletechnologies, Place, and Community (2011).

Gerard Goggin (gerard.goggin@sydney.edu.au<mailto:gerard.goggin@sydney.edu.au>) is Professor and Chair of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. His books include the Routledge Companion to Mobile Media (2013; with Larissa Hjorth), New Technologies and the Media (2012), Global Mobile Media (2010), Mobile Technology: From Telecommunications to Media (2009; with Larissa Hjorth), and Cell Phone Culture (2006).

CFP: DIS’12 Workshops - DIY Biology, Designing Wellbeing and Slow technology (due March)

A couple of workshops for the upcoming DIS conference in Newcastle have been announced. Submissions have opened.

Workshop submissions due March 2012. See individual call for exact dates. ACM Conference Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) June 2012, Newcastle UK.

Slow Technology: Critical Reflection and Future Directions - We invite participants to submit a short written position paper as well as a depiction of an artifact perceived to be constitutive of Slow Technology. The written portion consists of a short 1-2 page submission formatted using the ACM DIS 2012 template that responds to the statement “Slow Technology is…” This introductory statement is intended to provoke the author(s) to take a specific position on the Slow Technology agenda and offer their conceptualization of what Slow Technology is. This workshop paper could (but is not required to) use the author(s) own philosophical, theoretical, empirical, or design/craft-based work to support their position. Read more.

(DIY)biology, Designing for Open Source Science - Our one-day DIS’12 workshop will bring together a diverse group of designers and HCI researchers, as well as biologists, bioartists, and members of the DIYbio community to critically re-envision the role HCI might play at the intersection of biology, computation and DIY. We will engage directly with DIYbio initiatives to explore the materials, practices and challenges of garage biology. Drawing on presentations from participants who work with organic materials, hands-on biology activities (such as extracting DNA), and structured discussions, we hope to address themes such as: opportunities and implications for integrating organic materials into interactive systems; technologies that support and hinder public engagement with science; and HCI’s role in the public discourse around bioethics and biosafety. Read more.

Designing Wellbeing - This two-day workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers, designers and practitioners who are currently working on wellbeing in the field of interaction design or health care, or are interested in the topic. Read more.

Perspectives on Participation: Evaluating cross-disciplinary tools, methods, and practices - In this workshop we aim to explore the growing fascination with participation across design, art, social science and the sciences in recent years. We find ourselves in a situation where the boundaries between participatory tools and methods from specific disciplines are becoming blurred. Researchers and practitioners must now negotiate the appropriateness of methods and tools given the different epistemologies and practices across various disciplines. There comes a temptation to develop or use new methods and processes without necessarily understanding those that have been used before. There is often little reflection on why we might want to involve people in design and artistic practices, nor understand the motivations of those who do participate and what they take from the process. At the same time, project and funding commitments may mean participation becomes an end in itself as opposed to a means for improving research processes and products. Read more.

Thanks to Fil Salustri for keeping his eyes open for interesting design calls on his blog http://designcalls.wordpress.com/

Read more on http://dis2012.org/

Call for Chapters: Virtual Bands, Virtual Music (due May 31, 2012)

To what extent is contemporary popular music driven by the digital media, music technology, and creative artistic technology? Contributions for an edited collection on Virtual Bands, Virtual Music.

Shara Rambarran and Sheila Whiteley are seeking contributions from the wide spectrum of musicology and social sciences for an edited text on Virtual Bands, Virtual Music that will reflect upon its origins, its characters, its music(s), its scattered identity, its legacy, its worldwide membership and circulation. How can we define aesthetically, culturally, politically, and ideologically the concept and meaning of virtual bands? To what extent is contemporary popular music driven by the digital media (Internet, digital music distribution, consumption), music technology (sampling, remix, MP3), and creative artistic technology (music video, performance, virtual groups)?

Suggestions for chapters (non-exhaustive) include:

  • Origins and legacy
  • Music and the Performer (creativity, authorship, identity)
  • Fantasy worlds, fantasy characters
  • Reception (digital consumption, digital technologies, activism)
  • The Music Industry (impact, copyright, digital distribution)

Other, more general, possible categories:

  • The musical genres
  • The role of technology (instrumental, sampling, remix, MP3)
  • Associated subcultures
  • Legacies
  • Circulation
  • Gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and identity
  • Influence of ‘orientalism’ and geopolitics
  • Intellectual debates
  • The media: reports, reception, gossip
  • Graphic arts (animation, 3D holograms)

Proposals should be 500 words maximum and should include keywords and a brief biog of the author. Submitting a proposal implies that it only contains original, non-published material and that it is not simultaneously being submitted to another publication.

The deadline for submissions is 31 May, 2012. A decision on inclusions will be made by 1 July, 2012 and chapters will need to be finalised by August 31, 2013 to allow time for final editing.

Proposals should be submitted electronically to sheila.whiteley(at)googlemail.com and shararambarran(at)yahoo.co.uk

IxDA 2012 Student Design Challenge - design the future of news, win a scholarship to Interaction ‘12 in Dublin

We’re in a time of upheaval over how we stay informed. People follow breaking news via Twitter. Tablets, mobile phones, paywalls, RSS feeds, viral videos and other elements have found their way into the current news landscape. The experience has swollen far beyond the icons of the daily newspaper on your doorstep and the 6 o’clock newscast. We know that people are consuming news differently, and these emerging practices are changing the news. What is the future of the news? What do we even mean by “the news” anyway?

Entries close by December 5.

2012 Interaction Design Association Student Design Challenge

This year, Thomson Reuters and the IxDA challenge you to look beyond the forms of delivery to address the behaviors, interactions, and goals that surround news.

We want you to explore the interaction design implications of questions such as:

  • What are people trying to achieve with news?
  • How do we identify that a particular story is important or relevant?
  • What is the relationship between the different types of information that currently make up “news”? (e.g., entertainment, local, breaking news, weather, data, etc.)
  • What is the potential for emerging trends in how news is produced, from hyperlocal to citizen journalism?

The challenge runs in two stages: an online entry (see how to enter) followed by an on-site masterclass and design challenge. The challenge is open to current students and anyone who has graduated in 2011.

See http://interaction12.ixda.org/student-challenge for more information on
the prizes, judges and how to enter.