rfp for “Hybrid Design Practices: A Workshop on Leisure and Play” - submit by June 25th, workshop on Sept. 30

My colleague, Silvia Lindtner, and advisor, Barry Brown, are organizing a workshop on hybrid design practices at the upcoming Ubicomp 2009 conference.

They are looking for participant submissions from ethnographers, designers, and researchers who have experience in design methodologies and practices.

This looks like a fun workshop! Plus it takes place at Disneyland :)

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The focus of this workshop is on hybrid design practices, approaches that draw on techniques from various fields to create novel methods of inquiry. The aims of this workshop are, first, to bring together a multi-disciplinary group of practitioners and researchers to learn from one another’s expertise in choosing and evaluating methods of design practice, and, second, to discuss implications of the underlying methodologies and epistemologies upon which these techniques are built.

Participants will actively contribute to the practical focus of the workshop; we call for submissions detailing the practices participants leverage in their own work, from which we will select methods of research engagement that will further shape the workshop.

Through hands-on field exploration of leisure activities in the public spaces of the Disney properties, design exercises, and brainstorming, participants will be actively involved with the application of a variety of methods to the study and design of ubiquitous computing systems from the ground-up. By leveraging methods and guiding theories that participants commonly use in their own work, we will explore the contrasts and intersections between the approaches put forward by the participants. The goals of this workshop, then, are twofold; first, to open up a space for reflection on current approaches towards interdisciplinary research and design in Ubicomp, and second, to develop a new vocabulary, both practically and theoretically, for “making” interdisciplinary Ubicomp research, thus, marking the study of hybrid design practice as an area of community-wide inquiry.