9th Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars (Apr 2011, Delaware)

Date: 16 April 2011
Deadline for submission: 24 November 2010

The Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware invites submissions for papers to be given at the Ninth Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars.

Focus: Objects order the social body and mediate cultural interactions. Yet, at the same time, objects can be deployed against established structures. Whether designed to effect change or repurposed to undermine normative practices, objects often revolt against social, cultural, intellectual, economic and political systems. This conference seeks papers that explore the creation, use and manipulation of things as they reorder our world.

18th Intl Product Development Management Conf (Jun 2011, Delft)

Deadline for 500 word abstracts: 5 November 2010
Website: http://www.eiasm.org/frontoffice/event_announcement.asp?event_id=670

The 18th International Product Development Management Conference (IPDMC) will be held from June 5-7, 2011 at the Delft University of Technology in the historic town of Delft in The Netherlands. For the first time in the history of this conference, it will move to a Design School; the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. This faculty is the largest university-based design school in the world with more than 2,000 students enrolled in the bachelor degree or in one of the three masters programs that the faculty offers

The special theme for our conference will be “Innovate through Design”. This means that we welcome papers on the topics of design thinking and design management along with the more common innovation management and new product development themes for the IPDM Conference. We plan to hold a special exhibition highlighting innovative product designs that have been developed at the faculty in the hall in which we will take refreshments. Special key notes will be delivered by famous designers and by high profile academics.

Full details available at the website.

Conference leaflet available on :
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3144742/IPDM%20conference%20booklet%20final.pdf

Making visible the invisible: Data Visualisation in Art, Design and Science Collaborations (Mar 2011, Huddersfield UK)

A two-day conversational* conference on interdisciplinary collaboration in data visualisation
University of Huddersfield, UK, March 10th-11th 2011
1st Call for Abstracts, 300 word limit, Submission deadline: December 6th 2010
Website: http://www.hohlwelt.com/en/conferences/visible.html

In recent years numerous visualisations involving scientific data and scientific themes have emerged from interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, scientists and designers. Works reach across diverse media, ranging from applied screen-based applications to experimental physical installations. While some are intended to inform by making the complex and abstract clear and visual, others focus on the aesthetic quality of the experience. What many of the works have in common is being the outcome of collaboration across disciplines.

This event seeks not only to contribute to the debate around data visualisation but also to a better understanding of what makes interdisciplinary collaborations successful. We wish to provide a platform for open dialogue and discussion across disciplinary cultures and seek a better understanding of the critical requirements for interdisciplinary collaboration. We ask what are the most fruitful conditions for interdisciplinary collaboration? How can trans-disciplinary understanding be best facilitated?

Competition: crowdsourcing a better workplace (Dec 19 2010)

Deadline for submissions: 19 December 2010.

Say Thanks, a competition to design a better workplace award using the principles of crowdsourcing, launched today at SayThanks.com. Each year, millions of workers around the world are given awards in recognition of their good work, from trophies and plaques to wrist watches and lapel pins. Say Thanks wants to break from the norm and let people design the awards they themselves would love to receive.

ICOHTEC Symposium 2011: Consumer Choice and Technology (Aug 2011, Glasgow)

The International Committee for the History of Technology’s 38th Symposium in Glasgow, Scotland, 2 – 7 August 2011
Deadline for proposals is 31 January 2011

The 38th ICOHTEC Symposium will be held in Glasgow on 2-7 August 2011. The main theme of the meeting will be Consumer Choice and Technology. The aim is to examine the interaction of technology and consumer behaviour in a historical perspective, with a primary focus on factors steering consumption and how consumers by their choices have influenced technological development. The transition from agrarian society to consumer society is one of the epoch making phases in human history that can be studied from various aspects and contexts.

DPPI-11: Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces (Jun 2011, Milano)

22 – 25 June 2011
How Can Design Research serve Industry?
Design visions, tools and knowledge for industry
Deadline for submission: 30 January 2011

In these days a mantra for companies and institutions seems to be, almost mandatorily, the need to become design-oriented, in order to increase their capability to build value, generate innovation and increase market shares as well as profits. This mantra, more often than not, comes with another one: design innovation is putting the user at the center of the project. Research on pleasurable products and interfaces is playing an important role in this debate elaborating and formalizing new knowledge on people (end users, value co-producers, etc.) and their needs, expectations, beliefs, values, desires; and suggesting the possibility to exploit user centered design in sectors and markets that are not commonly thought as being inherent its field of research. This has produced a significant amount of knowledge, mainly through vast experimentation, whereas less has been said on how to integrate this knowledge in industry. Apparently there is a disconnection between research on user centered design and pleasurability, and design practices inside industry, especially in SMEs contexts. Given these premises, it would be very interesting to investigate how this research can be integrated into industry, and to discuss it in relation to other approaches to design innovation.

Intl Conf on Naturalistic Decision Making (May 2011, Orlando)

Deadline for submission: 20 December 2010.

You are invited to submit to the Call for Papers for the 10^th International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM-2011) to be held in Orlando, Florida, USA, May 31^st – June 3^rd, 2011.  As you may know, NDM and the CEDM have a long and rich history of interaction.  And this conference represents an important milestone for NDM since it has been over 20 years since this community first began meeting.

European Architectural History Network (May 2012, Brussels)

Second International Meeting of the European Architectural History Network
Brussels, Belgium, 31 May – 3 June 2012
Call for Session and Roundtable Proposals
Deadline: 19 December 2010

The European Architectural History Network (EAHN) is organizing its Second pan-European meeting in Brussels in 2012. In accordance with the EAHN mission statement, this meeting proposes to increase the visibility of the discipline of architectural history, to foster transnational, interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches to the study of the built environment, and to facilitate the exchange of research results in the field. The main purpose of the meeting is to map the general state of research in disciplines related to the built environment, to promote discussion of current themes and concerns, and to foster new directions for research in the field.

JED Special Issue on Design Creativity (Jan 2012)

Guest Editors:
Yukari Nagai, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
John Gero, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, USA

Designers are change agents in a society. They are one of the groups that add value in botheconomic and in human terms. Design research focuses on understanding designing as a process. Much design research aims to understand routine designing in order to build tools that aid the designer primarily by improving their efficiency. As our understanding of routine designing increases, the topic of creativity in designing attracts increasing interest as a means of widening the scope of our understanding of designing and as a basis for the development of tools thataugment the designer. In order to elucidate the nature of engineering design, issues related to thecognitive processes underlying design creativity are being studied as are computational models of design creativity. Research into designing processes is starting to view designing as a social aswell as a technical process and that the products of designing involve human and social dimensions.

The Death and Life of “Social Factors” (Apr 2011, California)

The Death and Life of “Social Factors”
Reexamining Behavioral and Cultural Research in Environmental Design
College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA, USA
April 29 – May 1, 2011
Deadline for abstract submission: 15 November 2010

Ever since William Whyte observed New Yorkers taking lunch breaks in urban plazas and Amos Rapoport demonstrated the role of social and cultural factors in shaping traditional houses, research on the two-way relationship between people and the environment has been part of the field of environmental design, including architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. This interest in the social quality of space has been taken up by many different researchers, from New Urbanists to sociologists such as Elizabeth Shove and Simon Guy. Meanwhile, theoretical and methodological developments in our field, such as Clare Cooper Marcus’s study on Easter Hill Village or Christopher Alexander’s pattern language, set grounds for our own and other disciplines, respectively. Throughout the last 40 years, psychologists, behaviorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, among others, have contributed to a body of knowledge applicable to design at many scales through a broad spectrum of methodological and theoretical orientations.