Welcome to DesignCalls

Welcome to DesignCalls, a blog for posting announcements of calls for papers for design-oriented journals and conferences.  I’m still not sure how this blog’s functionality will evolve over time.  Hopefully, its layout and design will improve in response to how it’s used.

PerFab 2013 – 1st International Workshop on Personal and Pervasive Fabrication (Sep 2013, Zurich)

Dates: 9 September 2013
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Website: http://32leav.es/perfab/
Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2013

In conjunction with the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2013)

Recently, technologies for fabricating real-world objects and products that can be designed and built directly by the end-user have decreased in costs and are increasingly common. These technologies are expected to have a great impact on society. However, there is a great need to explore many novel research challenges and issues before the idea of personal fabrication becomes truly pervasive and applicable to the wider public. Our workshop is aimed at facilitating discussion and exploration of these challenges. We encourage submissions of research papers, work-in-progress papers with interesting preliminary results, and position papers. Attendance at the workshop is not limited, as anyone may register and attend. The long-term goal is to gather a community of researchers and establish this workshop as a leading forum for research dissemination in the area.

Service Design and Innovation conference (9-11 April 2014)

Service Design and Innovation (ServDes) conference

Theme: Service Futures

9-11 April 2014, Lancaster, UK

http://www.servdes.org/

ServDes, The Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation, is the premier international research conference exploring service design and service innovation. Submitted contributions are subject to a double-blind peer-review process. Accepted contributions will be published electronically in the conference proceedings and selected best papers will be published within special issues on Service Design in The Design Journal (http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/journal/the-design-journal/) or the Managing Service Quality journal (http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=msq).

Call for academic submissions: International journal ‘Message’: Mapping Eclecticism Through Practice – Inaugural publication (June 2013 UK)

Message
Mapping Eclecticism Through Practice (Inaugural publication)
Communication Design, Graphic Design, Illustration, Visual Communication et al.
Where if any do the mutual theoretical frameworks and methodologies lie?

Website: http://messageresearch.net
Deadline: Dates for submission:
14 June 2013

Call for academic submissions
Scholarly submissions are invited for consideration in the full colour, large format, international journal, Message.
Message, Mapping Eclecticism through Practice will be published in December 2013.
Authors of published papers and reports will be invited to present these at the Plymouth University, Message symposium in 2014.

Call for Proposals: UnDesign

Editor: Dr Gavin Sade, Dr Gretchen Coombes and Professor Andrew McNamara
Affiliation: Urban Modernities Research Group, Queensland University of Technology
Title: UnDesign: Critical practices at the intersection of Art and Design.
Dates: To be published in late 2014, publisher not yet confirmed
Deadline for Abstracts: 31 May 2013
Contact: editors@undesign.net.au
URL: http://undesign.net.au/

ABOUT UNDESIGN

Undesign is calling for submissions from researcher, curators, theorists as well as practicing designers and artists, for an edited text to be published in late 2014 – early 2015.

Traditionally, design has been placed in a framework that emphasizes its utility over aesthetic or other non-functional considerations. UnDesign seeks to document new developments in design that connect with science, engineering, biotechnology and hactivism, which operate at the intersection of art and design.  Often confounding and speculative, these practices exist outside mainstream commercial design and share many traits with contemporary art. “Undesigning” practices aim to undo the complex designed world by revealing how human designing implicitly structures our world.

UnDesign will examine the ideas, speculations and practices that constitute this burgeoning new field of practice that unravels design’s traditional definitions and assumptions in order to develop a very different concept of design practice in the 21st century.  The publication aims to combine essays with the presentation of significant works of art and design. It will focus on practices that:

• occur at the intersection of art and design;
• engage with “our” contemporary real/digital “life world” in a critical manner;
• operate as provocative interventions within design thinking and the design environment;
• combine practice and research as well as text, action and object;
• have redirective design intentions.

Design Competition: Sustainable Laundry (May 2013)

Deadline for submissions: 31 May 2013
Website: http://www.designwithculture.co.uk/

A competition for creative, enthusiastic designers or design students from around the globe. Showcase your innovations and you could win a Nexus tablet.

See details at the website.

INTERACT 2013 Workshop: Urban Agriculture: A Growing Field of Research (Sep 2013, Cape Town, South Africa)

Date: 3 September 2013
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Website: http://www.urbaninformatics.net/resources/interact2013cfp/
Deadline for submission: UPDATED 19 May 2013

Growing food presents diverse challenges and opportunities within the urban environment. As cities develop, population density rises, land prices rise, and the opportunity to use land for traditional farming and gardening diminishes. Counter to this trend there are a growing number of both community gardens, city farms, ‘guerilla gardening’, effective use of rooftop gardens, pot plants, windowsill herbs and backyard gardens cropping up in different cities, all with a purpose to produce local food, supplemented in part by food co-op organisations. This workshop brings together practitioners and researchers in the field of urban agriculture and HCI to explore the different forms of growing practice and the sustainable impact of locally grown produce.

The Creative Exchange Interactive Conference: Academic Engagement with the Creative Sector (Sep 2013, Lancaster UK)

Dates: 26-27 September 2013
Location: Lancaster University, UK
Website: http://thecreativeexchange.org/The-KE-Conference
Submission Requirements: 13 May 2013

This interactive conference is aimed at exploring new mutually beneficial exchanges between academia and the creative industries. It will not be a traditional ‘sit and listen’ conference. There will be a high degree of both experimentation in the form of the conference and interaction throughout the conference. Proud is contributing to one of the 3 experimental sessions within the conference.

We are calling for contributions from
- Academics developing new understandings of the creative sector
- Creative sector professionals interested in undertaking research and collaborating with academic partners

Addressing subjects including
- New processes, tools or approaches that facilitate knowledge exchange and collaboration
- Insights, case studies, results and evaluation of knowledge exchange in practice

Submission: We invite you to submit a 2,000 word paper. We strongly encourage a wide range of papers and approaches, but equally would encourage submissions to include an indication of the research question(s)/issues addressed in the paper, and the approach employed in addressing these. Please include a 200 word summary.

Workshop: Participatory Design for Persons with Cognitive or Sensory Impairments @ Interact2013 (Sep 2013, Cape Town)

Dates: 3 September 2013
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Website: http://interact2013impairmentsworkshop.wordpress.com/
Deadline for application: 15 May 2013

Are you interested in participatory design and do you work with users with impairments? We organize a workshop on participatory design for persons with cognitive or sensory impairments at Interact 2013 in Cape Town, South Africa. This workshop will be held on Tuesday September 3rd.

Design and the Law: Opportunity and Constraint (Feb 2014, Chicago USA)

Dates: 12-15 February 2014
Location: Chicago, USA
Website: http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2014CallforParticipation.pdf
Deadline for submissions: 6 May 2013

Session chair: Carma Gorman, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, carmagorman@gmail.com.

Product designers, graphic designers, and fashion designers all work within the constraints of a constellation of state, national, and international laws and standards governing patents, trademarks, copyrights, copylefts, licensing, product configurations, color specifications, rules of origin, trade agreements, labor conditions, liability, accessibility, environmental protection, and so on. Although legal scholars have written extensively on these issues, relatively few humanistic scholars of design (among them Lawrence Busch, Howell John Harris, Sarah S. Lochlann Jain, Otakar Macel, Frederic J. Schwartz, and T’ai Smith) have examined how laws and standards have shaped manufacturers’, clients’, and designers’ decision-making and creative processes, and, in turn, how these groups’ practices have reshaped the law. This session therefore seeks papers that address the ways in which laws and standards have shaped or constrained the manufacture, configuration, or circulation of consumer products, graphics, and garments (or vice versa), either in the past or present. Both traditional scholarly analyses and first-person “constraint narratives” by designers are welcome.

Special Issue of the Intl J of Human-Computer Studies: Perspectives on participatory HCI research: Beginnings, middles and endings (July 2013)

Special Issue Theme: Perspectives on participatory HCI research: Beginnings, middles and endings
Website: http://di.ncl.ac.uk/participation/special-issue/
Deadline for submissions: 31 July 2013

Participation is a research area of sustained interest to the HCI community. Traditionally, the term has been used to suggest a democratized approach to the design of technology that calls for end-user involvement in the design process. This may vary from researchers inviting specific users or stakeholders to participate in design workshops, through to long term engagements with communities to define research questions and study deployments of new technologies. As HCI is an interdisciplinary field, however, there are multiple understandings of what participation in research might mean, from subjects and disciplines such as social science, participatory and performance arts, international development, and action research. Beyond these influences, there is also increased pressure from funding bodies and public institutions to involve a wider spectrum of the public in academic research. The convergence of these factors has drawn attention to the potential benefits and challenges, both theoretical and practical of involving users and the public in HCI research.