“SPACE = INTERACTION = DISCOURSE”
International conference

Plenary speakers:
* John A. Dixon, Lancaster University, UK
* Ole B. Jensen, Aalborg University, Denmark
* Elizabeth Keating, University of Texas at Austin, USA
* Lorenza Mondada, Université Lumière Lyon2, France
* Ron Scollon, Alaska, USA

Dates: 12th – 14th November 2008
Location: Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
Web site: http://www.placeme.hum.aau.dk/conf2008/

The aim of this international conference entitled “Space = Interaction = Discourse” is to bring together researchers who investigate space, mediated discourse and embodied interaction from different perspectives. The conference will highlight interdisciplinary research that explores how embodied and virtual social actors communicate, interact and coordinate their activities in complex multimodal environments, with a special focus on place, mobility and the body. Thus, this conference welcomes contributions by scholars and doctoral students in a range of disciplines and fields of inquiry, including discourse studies, conversation analysis, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, interaction analysis, architecture, design, geography, sociology, anthropology, environmental psychology, mobility studies, ubiquitous computing, computer-supported cooperative work and computer-supported cooperative learning. Please see the online call for papers for more details.

The conference will take place at Aalborg University, and it will consist of invited keynote lectures, parallel paper sessions and a workshop. The topics of the keynote lectures and workshop will be announced later.

Submissions are solicited for paper presentations (30 minutes including question time). Please submit an abstract and register on the website. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st February 2008. All submissions will be reviewed by the scientific committee. Notification of acceptance by 1st March 2008.

The registration fee is 1500 DKK (approx. 200 euro), which includes participation in the conference, a conference folder, the reception, three lunches and two coffee/tea breaks each day over the three days.

The conference is international and open to researchers, doctoral and graduate students.

If you would like to take part in this exciting conference, then please visit our website for further details: http://www.placeme.hum.aau.dk/conf2008/

For more information, contact the organiser: Paul McIlvenny: sid2008 (at) hum.aau.dk.

This conference is supported by the “PlaceME” Nordic research network (funded by NordForsk) and the Department of Language & Culture, Aalborg University.

The 10th anniversary conference on Participatory Design: Experiences and Challenges
September 30 – October 4, 2008
Bloomington, Indiana, USA
Sponsors: CPSR and ACM
http://www.pdc2008.org

Please visit the web-site to see the different contributions that we call for.

Submission deadline (all contribution types): March 15, 2008

Participatory Design (PD) is a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, tools, environments, businesses, and social institutions more responsive to human needs. A central tenet of PD is the direct involvement of people in the co-design of things and technologies they use. Participatory Design Conferences have been held every two years since 1990 and have formed an important venue for international discussion of the collaborative, social, and political dimensions of technology innovation and use.

The conference theme for PDC 2008 is Experiences and Challenges. It will be the 10th PDC and a golden opportunity to reassess the achievements of the PD movement and to consider its future. We invite you to reflect on past experiences and review the important lessons we have learned so as to better meet the new challenges of the future. What are the important trends, phenomena, developments, and views on participation and design etc., which in so many different ways challenge our traditions, our experiences and/or the current ‘wisdom’ within the field?

Internal news
Maria Basile, having been working in IPCity at Université Marne la Vallée, Champs sur Marne, is joining a new post in an other university. She will still be with us for the September Workshop in Paris. Burcu Ozdirlik, a gracious and skilled doctorant of our lab, coming from Turkey, is joining the team. She will also be present in September workshop.

TimeWarp poster accepted to SIGGRAPH2007
A poster titled “TimeWarp: An Explorative Outdoor Mixed Reality Game” by Iris Herbst, Sabiha Ghellah and Anne-Kathrin Braun has been accepted as a poster to the SIGGRAPH 2007.

SIGGRAPH 2007 posters: http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/attendees/posters/all.html
SIGGRAPH 2007: http://www.siggraph.org/s2007

Accepted paper
A paper by Giulio Jacucci and Ina Wagner titled “Performative Roles of Materiality for Collective Creativity” has been accepted for the special issue of the Leonardo Journal.

Accepted short paper
A paper titled “Urban Sketcher: Mixed Reality on Site for Urban Planning and Architecture” by M. Sareika and D. Schmalstieg has been accepted as a short paper to ISMAR 2007.

See http://www.ismar07.org

10-11 January 2008: Design Research Week Call for Papers and Projects

Conference to be held at the Interdisciplinary Design Institute of Washington State University Spokane. Topic: Design + Politics

From obtaining a building permit to raising environmental awareness in design, from “sick building syndrome” to designing for security, from off-grid housing to New Urbanist town planning, the design of built environments is intimately related to politics. The Interdisciplinary Design Institute holds its Fourth Annual Design Research Conference January 10-11, 2008, in Spokane, Washington, to discuss this relationship. This is an interactive conference in which invited speakers, paper presenters and students from a wide range of disciplines participate in multiple venues for the exchange ideas during the conference.

Submissions for papers and projects can address the following areas of concern (other related topics will of course be considered as well):

• The politics of implementing design
• The affect of gentrification on disadvantaged urban populations
• Funding diverse housing types to balance high-end condo boom
• Implications of design standards and policy on businesses and private property ownership
• Implementing service design into education: Habitat for Humanity, student involvement in medical, faith-based, criminal
  justice, etc, domains
• The politics of defensible space: how secure can you make things before you separate people from others?
• Implementing history: returning to historical “stage sets” to promote “new urbanism”
• How the built environment affects group behavior: prisons, hospitals, schools, corporate headquarters
• How do practitioners inform policies promoting “best practices?”
• Incorporating students “real-time” in policymaking and design decisions
• Updating planning and building codes to meet the cybernetic revolution
• Is ADA enough? Cultural sensitivities in relation to accessibility
• Can design be embedded in medical insurance policies?
• Gender, design, and politics

Presenters’ work actually presented at the conference will be further peer reviewed for inclusion in the Interdisciplinary Design and Research e-Publication (IDRP), sponsored by the WSU Interdisciplinary Design Institute: http://www.idrp.wsu.edu/.

Papers are to be a maximum of 5,000 words. Initial submission shall be an abstract not to exceed one page. For ease of distribution for blind peer review, be sure the document is in MS WORD (not pdf).

Projects can be designs (or concepts) of a built form of any scale, so long as an accompanying narrative explains how the project addresses the conference topic. Initial submission shall be a one page document providing an image of the project with a narrative explanation of sufficient length to fit on the same page.

All submissions must include contributor(s) name, affiliation, and contact information. Submission shall be by email only to davewang – at – wsu.edu. All submissions will be blind peer reviewed. DEADLINE for initial submissions: September 12, 2007, with decisions issued at the end of October.

Call for Papers, Architectural Concepts and Media Art Projects
MEDIACITY – Situations, Practices and Encounters
Conference of the MEDIACITY project
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
18-19th January 2008

The conference will investigate how the social settings and spaces of the city are created, experienced and practiced through the use and presence of new media. We will take the position that new media enables different settings, practices and behaviours to occur in urban space. These media create opportunities for diverse forms of connections between people and spaces and enable and create flows; of information, of communication and of knowledge.

The conference will consist of three parallel sessions and a workshop, which will explore these themes in a focussed way. We invite papers for the conference and less formal presentations on practices for the workshop session from academics, practitioners, activists close to disciplines such as media studies, architecture, urban studies, cultural and urban geography and sociology – using in innovative ways and reflecting critically on processes, methods and impacts of public participation and technologies in urban realm, within their theoretical and practical research, teaching, or activism roles.

Submission
Please submit a paper of between 2 and 4 pages as an extended abstract. The conference language will be English. Papers will be submitted to external review.

Outcomes
Selected papers from the conference will be published in a post-conference volume.

Important Dates
1st October 2007: Extended Abstracts dues
1st November 2007: Acceptance notification
18-19th January 2008: Conference

Contact and submissions: info(at)mediacityproject.com
Website: www.mediacityproject.com

Organizers
Prof. Frank Eckardt, Chair of Sociology of Globalization, Faculty of Architecture
Prof. Jens Geelhaar, Chair of Interface Design, Faculty of Media
Katharine S. Willis, Research Fellow
Laura Colini, Research Fellow
Konstantinos Chorianopoulos, Research Fellow
Ralf Hennig, Researcher, Co-ordination

The IPCity proposal to organise a workshop during CHI 2008 in Florence, Italy has been accepted. The one day workshop will be held on the 6th of April and in addition to IPCity members two outside experts have also been invited onto the programme committee. For more information see the IPCity website.

CHI2008: http://www.chi2008.org
MR workshop: https://ipcity.eu/workshop
CHI workshop page http://www.chi2008.org/workshopParticipants.html
CHI format page http://www.chi2008.org/formatting.html

The Street Beat music tour of Berlin is currently being tested. The system takes people on a tour of the underground culture of Berlin. The tests are ongoing and so far around eight people have taken part, more are expected over the coming weeks.

The first usability and presence tests for Timewarp took place in Cologne during August. Around eight people took part and they had a chance to meet the Heinzelmenchen of Cologne, some members of the public also expressed an interest with a group of children shouting “Cyborg” at one study participant. Further tests are planned.

Continuing with the mobile spatial theme, PerGames 2007 was held in Salzburg, Austria and ran in parallel with the ACM Computer Entertainment Conference. Sponsorship was provided by the EU Funded IPerG project which meant that the conference had more tracks than before and included a set of tutorials on specific aspects of pervasive games. These ranged from one covering patterns in pervasive game play through to how to commercialise the results. Some of the papers may also appear in the Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting and the ACM CE magazine. One of the amusing demonstrations was Salzburg Cityball – which is basically baseball played over an entire city using GPS enabled phones. For more information on PerGames visit: www.pergames.de

Rod McCall, Fraunhofer FIT