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.
Upcoming Workshop - Transnational Times: Locality, Globality and Mobility in Technology Design and Use
My great friend (and China researcher sidekick), Silvia Lindtner, is putting on a workshop (along with Irina Shklovski, Janet Vertesi, Paul Dourish) about the issues specific to technology design and research for transnational users or use contexts. It will take place on September 26, 2010 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Submit a 2-4 page paper about your related research to Silvia by June 15, 2010. More info below or check out the conference website.
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Transnational Times: Locality, Globality and Mobility in Technology Design and Use: A workshop at Ubicomp 2010
September 26, 2010 Copenhagen, Denmark
Organizers: Irina Shklovski, Silvia Lindtner, Janet Vertesi, Paul Dourish
This workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the role of ubiquitous computing, the use of information and communication technologies and the politics of technological design in transnational practices. The ultimate goal of this workshop is to investigate the implications for the design and development of ubiquitous technologies in non-western contexts. We will consider the implications for conducting research and technology design within and across global and networked sites of technology production and use. The aim of the workshop is to gain a deeper understanding of the social, cultural and economic practices within global IT development.
We will explore the following questions:
- What makes a transnational technology? What kinds of political, local and translocal, projects are at stake in the management of new technological sites?
- How unified is the internet? Can we speak of many internets? What are the various stakeholders involved in designing and using these many Internets?
- What is local and what is global? What is the role of mobility and circulation in constructing or moving between localities and globalities?
- What methods and methodologies might we constructively use to analyze and design for such complex, hybrid, and often virtual spaces?
