10th International Bauhaus Colloquium — Weimar 2007

The Reality of the Imaginary — Architecture and the Digital Image — Bauhaus-Universität Weimar April 19 – 22, 2007

Call for papers for young scholars and PhD candidates.

The Bauhaus Colloquium is an international conference which has been held at regular intervals since 1976. It is devoted to the theoretical, philosophical and historical investigation of contemporary architecture.

On the basis of the current debates on the digital media technologies, augmented reality and ubiquitous design the 10th International Bauhaus Colloquium will discuss The Reality of the Imaginary – Architecture and the Digital Image. It can be hardly overlooked but the new reality of the digital habitat has been unsettling architecture for quite some time. Steadily and increasingly the new image technologies are shaping the world on their terms.

Since the early 1990’s architecture theory has been shifting its theoretical focus from the linguistic sign to the digital image. For a while it even looked as if spatial imagination might be eventually absorbed by digital media. Some people even believed in a late fulfilment of the post-modern postulate of the end of architecture. But today the digital image techniques can no longer be reduced to a matterless, ephemeral and solely imaginary world. On the contrary, with the growing liquidification of the boundaries between digital images and the world of material objects, digital images do not any longer present an autonomous sphere.

The new image techniques not only interpret the world anew but actively interfere with its material and spatial practices, i.e. with its architectural constitution. In the context of today’s digital turn it seems as if especially today the imaginary digital world and the architectural material world are growing more permeable to each other.

Therefore the colloquium proposes to discuss architecture as a cultural practice that is engaged in a permanent process of border crossing between image and space, between sign and material and between the reality of the architectural space and the imaginary world of the digital sphere.

With this call for papers we are asking young scholars and PhD candidates for their application. Four
workshops will be offered. The topics of the workshops are the same as in the four plenary sessions:

• Image and Space
• Architecture and the Production of Visibility
• Urbane Image – Global Media
• Forms of Mobilizing the Gaze

Please send an abstract of maximum 300 words and indicate the workshop you think appropriate to your
work. Please attach a brief CV.

The deadline is January 12, 2007. Mail to be sent to: bauhaus-kolloquium {at} uni-weimar dot de

EuropIA.11: 11th International Conference on Design Sciences & Technology
Digital Thinking in Architecture, Civil Engineering, Archaeology, Urban Planning and Design : Finding the Ways — September: 19-21, 2007 – Montreal – Quebec – Canada

New digital cultures bring inevitable changes to our world and to the techniques, research methods and practices of design. The computer technology transforms slowly but surely the professions of environmental planning, architecture, archaeology and design. In recent years, we witness the emergence of digital methods using computer not only for facilitating technical tasks, but also to analyse project’s performance or amplify the creative thinking of designers. Educating the future professionals has become a real challenge due to the clash between fast developing technology and slower evolving new design thinking and values redefinition.

Confronting multi-disciplinary theoretical, teaching and practice experiences at the Europia11, will help finding the ways to the future of design.

Topics:

• Digital Design Thinking
• Environmental Design: Changing Values
• Digital Methods in Archaeology and Heritage Reconstruction
• Design Process and Know-how Communication

And EuropIA relevant subjects:

• Archaeology and Reconstruction
• Building and Construction Robotics
• Collaborative Design
• Design Education
• Design Support Environments
• Design Knowledge Representations
• Design Methods Process and Creativity
• Digital Fabrication and Prototyping
• Ecological and Sustainable Design
• Heritage Conservation and Reconstruction
• Human and Machine Intelligence
• Intelligent Design and Planning Tools
• Intelligent, Interactive and Responsive Environments
• Knowledge Based Design and Generative Systems
• Urban Design
• Virtual and Augmented Reality

Important Dates:

• December 1, 2006: Call for papers – Open
• March 15, 2007: Submission Full paper deadline
• April 30, 2007: Notifications to Authors
• June 15, 2007: Final papers camera ready

Papers Submission
Papers should be maximum 12 pages in length (a full page of text is about 500 words), i.e. your contribution might be around 5000 words long (including references) plus figures. Papers must be submitted in a word format to the following address: eia11-submit {at} europia.org.

Reviewing

• All papers will be reviewed using a blind refereeing process by at least two members of the International Advisory Board.
• The proceedings of the conference will be published by Europia – Publishers, Paris, France
• Special issue of the Journal: IJDST (http://europia.org/DST)

Link: http://europia.org/EIA11

The PerGames series of international symposia addresses the design and technical issues of bringing computer entertainment back to the real world with pervasive games.

Previous PerGames events were held in Vienna (2004), Munich (2005), Dublin (2006) and attracted researchers and practitioners from all over the world. PerGames 2007 will take place in and around Max Gandolf Saal at the University of Salzburg, Austria, on June 11. & 12. 2007. It will be co-located with the ACM Conference on Advancements in Entertainment Technologies (ACE). It is supported by IPerG, the Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming from the European Commission’s IST Programme.

PerGames 2007 will feature high quality paper presentations and demos reviewed by an international program committee of experts from the fields of Pervasive Computing and Gaming. This time, we call for four categories of participation:

• Research Papers (submission deadline is 1. March 2007)
• Research Posters (submission deadline is 15. April 2007)
• Live Demonstrations (… 15. April 2007)
• Citywide Games (… 15. April 2007)

Please regard the details on submission categories. Printed and online proceedings will be provided.

Link: http://www.pergames.de/

The Enactive/07 conference will be held in Grenoble (France) on November 19-22, 2007. Enactive/07 is an international scientific and cultural event, promoted by the European Network of Excellence ENACTIVE.

Seizing the opportunity of its welcome to Grenoble, an historical place in France for innovation in Arts, the 4th International Conference on Enactive Interfaces will be extended by an intellectual and artistic event: Enaction_in_Arts.

4th International Conference on Enactive Interfaces In the continuation of previous editions, Enactive / 07 aims at promoting the concept of Enaction in the field of Information and Communication Technologies. Creative researchers, innovative engineers and producers are invited to confront their last theoretical, experimental, technological and applicated advances during various talk, demo and poster sessions.

Enaction_in_Arts
Arts and Culture is one of the main fields that are intimately linked with contemporary concepts and technologies. Enaction_in_Arts sessions aim at promoting innovative artistic creations, theories and technologies for the Future of Arts. It will be a unique meeting at the crossing point of Art – Science – Technology and will offer to researchers, engineers and artists the opportunity to discover cutting-edge research, technologies and artworks centered around Enaction and Enactive Systems.

Your are cordially invited to submit:

• Artworks and demonstrations for Enaction_in_Arts sessions (deadline January 31, 2007)
• Scientific papers (deadline July 10, 2007)
• Ateliers (deadline September 10, 2007)
• Exhibit spaces (deadline September 10, 2007)

For more information, please visit Enactive/07 website: http://www.enactive2007.org

AAU has employed a new co-worker to work on the IPCity project. Giang Phuong Nguyen from Vietnam will have her Ph.d. defense in Holland in the early 2007, but will join AAU in January to get introduced to the work currently done. Afterwards Giang will carry on the work that has been made until now.

For more information on Giang’s background, see her homepage, http://staff.science.uva.nl/~giangnp/isis/homepage/

Exploring the Practices & Technologies of Representing the Urban Environment in Human-Computer Interaction

Recent technological developments mark the city as a central and perhaps special space for human-computer interaction research and practice. Visions of ubiquitous computing, the resonance of the ‘urban probe’, and the proliferation of interactive mapping services speak to the significance of the urban landscape to studies of Human-Computer Interaction. But such visions and technologies require, produce and reproduce images of urban space that influence what these systems, and our interactions with them, are and might be. Developing and employing technologies for the urban environment requires visualization techniques that both reflect and challenge how we image, and consequently imagine, the city.

This one-day workshop will explore the practices and technologies of imaging the urban environment, bringing together an interdisciplinary array of designers, HCI experts, urban planners and technologists to investigate such issues as:

• How do we represent the city in HCI, and how do these representations inform HCI research and practice?
• What kinds of technological devices, services, and platforms support imaging the city now and might be created in the near future?
• How are and might these new representations of the city and urban imaging technologies be used for social and political ends?
• What new methods are required for developing technologies that image the city in new ways?
• What can we learn from the urban experience to design stronger representations and interfaces within HCI research and practice?

We welcome position papers from HCI practitioners, architects, visualization specialists, urban planners, futurists and artists. Sample topics might include:

• Novel design and use of interactive mapping technologies
• ‘Mashups’ and other user-driven combinations of imaging, information and location-based technologies and services
• Urban surveillance technologies: their uses, abuses and implications
• Urban environmental sensing: the social, technical and visualization challenges
• and opportunities
• The design and design implications of GPS-enabled/location-aware devices
• Flickr photosharing, photoblogs and the geo-coding of images

Link: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/cdisalvo/chi2007workshop/

The use of geo-referenced information on the web has recently received increasing interest in the research community and the public. People use interactive maps to share their favourite places with others, and they use geo-browsing services for planning their vacation. Spatial information is even more useful in mobile situations, because it is directly related to the user’s surroundings.

The idea of Mobile spatial interaction (MSI) is becoming increasingly relevant, feasible and desired. Location and orientation sensing hardware is being integrated into a growing number of handsets and can be expected to be even more widespread in the near future. At the same time, geographic information systems and 3D models are becoming more sophisticated.

The workshop Mobile Spatial Interaction will aim to help researchers realize the vision of seamless and intuitive Mobile Spatial Interaction. The goal is to reach beyond the conventional model of location by creating a sense of space and orientation.

The intention is to bring together researchers and practitioners from areas as diverse as: mobile application design; geographic information systems, geodesy and geoinformatics; pervasive game design; communications theory and social software design; experimental hardware prototyping; commercial device manufacturing; psychology of spatial perception; semantic systems and natural language processing; marketing; multimedia arts; tourism and cultural heritage; information visualization and sonification; spatial audio; and augmented reality.

Link: http://msi.ftw.at/

Tangible User Interface (TUI) research addresses critical issues in HCI, including reflective practice in product design, embodied interaction, and ubiquitous computing. However, these can be obscured by gadget design concepts, and the technical challenge of devices and infrastructure. This workshop is an opportunity to step aside from the frustrations of making the technology work, focusing on concerns that underlie TUI research. It is of special interest to students aiming to advance the field, and commercial researchers seeking innovative applications.

Themes include analytic and generative theories of TUIs, and deployment and evaluation in real contexts. Participants should have experience of designing and building TUIs, but we encourage position papers that “step away from the workbench” to reflect on the goals and context of research, such as:

• Human factors of manipulation
• Semantic mappings between physical and virtual
• Applied epistemology / ontology
• Social facilitation through shared objects
• Physical and material design spaces

The workshop will start with reviews of research themes emerging from position papers, emphasising current state of the field. Participants will then analyse specific design test cases from industry, or current fieldwork, applying these theoretical perspectives in structured small group discussion. Organisers are experienced leaders in the field, including Alan Blackwell (chair), George Fitzmaurice, Lars-Erik Holmquist, Hiroshi Ishii, and Brygg Ullmer. Commercial participants include Boeing and Nokia.

Please submit position papers, of no more than 4 pages, to alan.blackwell [at] cl.cam.ac.uk. At least one author of accepted papers must register for the workshop, and for one conference day.

Link: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/conference/tangibleinterfaces/

Call for papers: Architecture in the Space of Flows: buildings – spaces – cultures

Flows of energy, libido, capital, water and information make our lives possible. The buildings and spaces that support our activities inflect the flows; we tap into them, surf them, block them at our peril, or we may be excluded from them. Flows are global, but have local effects. Buildings are local, but their embodied energies flow from great distances, and their embodiments can cause local or distant turbulences. Everything is moving, intensifying, dispersing; growing, decaying, proliferating, networking, sedimenting, eroding.

Understanding ourselves, our buildings, our cities as modulators of flows represents a fundamental shift in sensibility away from the perfect Euclidian geometries of Vitruvian man, to the productive consumer, the desiring subject. Cultures and spaces are fluid and relational, and designers are searching for ways to give expression to these telluric undercurrents that are shaping and re-shaping our worlds. New sensibilities are taking shape, and it is the aim of this conference to explore and gain understanding of emergent possibilities.

The conference, or confluence, will be transdisciplinary, bringing together people who are developing ways of thinking about places and our responses to them, making use of ideas of flux.

Keynote Speakers:
Anthony Vidler, Cooper Union
Emily Apter, New York University
Andrew Ballantyne, Newcastle University
Erin Manning, Sense Lab, Concordia University (to be confirmed)
Brian Massumi, Universite de Montreal (to be confirmed)

Convenors:
Andrew Ballantyne, Jean Hillier, Sally Jane Norman and Chris L.
Smith

Hosted by:
Tectonic Cultures Research Group, School of Architecture,
Planning & Landscape and Culture Lab

Link: http://www.apl.ncl.ac.uk/flows/

The fullday workshop on MRUI will be held during the IEEE Virtual Reality 2007 Conference (March 10-14 2007) in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.

Current trends in high-performance, mobile computing devices suggest that Mixed Reality applications will not only be available for experts in predefined settings but also for everyday users in an often changing context. Mixed Reality applications could be run in different hardware setups, at different context conditions, and they will have to accommodate configuration and adaptation both at compile and run-time. Such new scenarios will require novel methods for specification, novel tools for application authoring, and novel ways to include adaptation into non-functional requirements of MR applications, among other key elements in this future software line. We believe, these issues are important features in the future of MR, and solutions to them will be essential to overcome the complexity of development in a world with several options for devices and levels of computational power, as well as with heterogeneous users possessing various levels of experiences, skills and personal preferences.

After our productive workshop on the Specification of Mixed Reality User Interfaces: Approaches, Languages, Standardization at IEEE VR 2006, we would like to invite researchers and practitioners alike to participate in this thematically related workshop and discuss suitable conceptual models, development approaches, and tools for context-aware MR applications of the future. Some questions we would like to discuss and which may be addressed in submissions include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Which methods can be used to specify, model, and build MRUIs, which adapt themselves to various contexts?
• How do varying contexts influence spatial interaction, i.e. interacting in different spatial contexts?
• How do we envision the production cycle of MR applications? Which novel tools or authoring systems are required to facilitate the work of MR developers?
• What type of compile time configuration issues and runtime changes should we take into consideration in the development of adaptive MRUIs?
• How can a MRUI be adapted to better support certain tasks in certain situations (e.g. switch from a 3D to a 2D interface; use audio input instead of gestures etc.)
• How can the rendering of MRUIs be adjusted to environmental influences (such as a closed Cave, a lab with good lighting conditions, an open space urban situation etc.)
• How can 3D interfaces be better integrated into our surroundings? How do they help us in supporting the idea of pervasive computing? How do they relate to other smart and intelligent items?
• Which concepts and tools exist for quickly building and testing adaptive MRUIs?
• What is the design space of novel MR applications? Which requirements should novel languages in MR development fulfill? Do we require standards for MR development?

Call for Participation

Participants are invited to submit a research paper, experience report or position statement, which will be reviewed by the international program committee.

• Research papers should describe original and high quality research work within the scope of this workshop. Papers are expected to be 4-8 pages long.
• Experience reports shall describe experiences and lessons learned with modeling, implementing and maintaining MR applications. Submissions are expected to be papers of 2 pages.
• Position statements can describe research questions, practical problems, claims, novel ideas etc. and should be presented on a maximum of 2 pages.

The workshop papers will be published as printed proceedings with an ISBN. Additionally, all workshop contributions (including supplementary material) will be available on the conference DVD and on the workshop homepage.

Download call for paper as PDF: http://www.mrui2007.org/MRUI07-CfP.pdf

Submissions should follow the IEEE Computer Society format. Please include all author and contact information in your submission. Additional materials (text, video, pictures, XML files etc.) are welcomed to support the submission. Unless clearly indicated otherwise, submission of a workshop contribution and associated materials implies permission for a publication on the Web.

All papers must be submitted electronically using the online conference system.

• Submission deadline: January 5th, 2007
• Notification of acceptance: January 19th, 2007
• Camera-ready submission: January 26th, 2007

Link: http://www.mrui2007.org/
Link: http://conferences.computer.org/vr/2007/