Call for submissions to upcoming graphic design book “Design to Renourish: Sustainable Design in Practice”

Have you or your design team produced graphic design projects with people, planet, profit in mind, particularly while employing a sustainable systems approach? If so, we want to hear from you!

We’re looking for international case studies of sustainably produced print, digital, signage, and comprehensive branding campaigns for the upcoming book Design to Renourish: Sustainable Graphic Design in Practice by Eric Benson & Yvette Perullo (Focal Press).

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MARCH 2, 2015

About the Book

Design to Renourish is a book for graphic design professionals who want to integrate a sustainable ethos into their workflow. The book is about being ethical, empathetic, and effective as a design professional for clients and society. It addresses the real life challenges of working with the client to create sustainable work by detailing various approaches to successfully completed client project case studies that embrace a sustainable systems methodology. The designers interviewed for each case study will explain how they collaborated with clients to achieve the most sustainable—and successful—outcome.

Chapter Proposals for Heritage as a path to innovation: a reflection on European Design in the near future (March 2015)

Website: http://www.masterofeuropeandesign.com/
Deadline for submission of notice of interest: 2 March 2015

Recently, a wealth of discourses is proposing design as a discipline capable of bridging the gap between academic research and everyday applications, innovation theories and companies’ capacities, cultural mixes and society/citizenship renewal. However, rather than benefiting from these interests, design is often squeezed into too many faulty statistics and incomplete reports, that make the disciplinary field increasingly slippery. Design is infinitely expanding its interests: from products to services, systems, cultures, strategies, citizenship, and so on. Issues are requiring further investigation, while the complexity and the turbulence of the actual socio-economical system are seeking a clearer disciplinary focus, that could easily communicate design to all potentially interested parties – from companies to policy makers, and citizens.
How can we map the contemporary/future practices of design?
Which are the important shifts to be proposed/envisaged in design education?
Which topics are relevant for current design PhD paths?
What would a European perspective on this disciplinary shift look like?

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: build it with your eyes closed (working title)

Contact: builditwithyoureyesclosed@gmail.com or jamesbenedictbrown@yahoo.co.uk
Deadline for submissions: 00:01GMT Thursday 4 September 2014

Describe, in no more than 350 words, the most successful first year undergraduate architecture design project that you have either given as a teacher or received as a student.

• Why was it successful?
• What happened?
• What was learned?
• What pedagogical theories or frameworks did it employ?
• How did it influence your subsequent teaching and learning? 

Submissions must comply with the following parameters:

• 350 words maximum
• unformatted text in MS Word format
• no illustrations, tables or figures
• bibliography provided (where appropriate) in Harvard format
• include your name, location and (where appropriate) institution

Submissions should be emailed as attachments to builditwithyoureyesclosed@gmail.com no later than 00:01GMT Thursday 4 September 2014.

Architectural educators, graduates and students are invited to critically reflect on what they regard as the most successful and/or influential design studio assignment within the first year of an architectural education. The project is inspired by (but has no relation to) ‘Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: the Art of the Art Assignment’ (New York, NY: Paper Monument, ISBN 9780979757549), in which eighty-nine artists and fine art tutors critically reflect upon their experiences of the fine art assignment as students or tutors.

Following this call for submissions, ‘build it with your eyes closed’ will run as an open workshop for the duration of Living and Learning, the 2nd international conference of the of the association of architectural educators (aae) at the University of Sheffield, England, 3-5 September 2014. Living and Learning explores the notion of ‘liveness’, not just as experienced through live projects, but expanded to consider different forms of community participation and civic engagement, material and constructed interventions. This conference offers a platform for critical reflection on the most recent wave of ‘live’ innovations in design studio teaching and beyond. The conference is centred on architecture education, but invites contributions from any disciplinary context which might offer insight and spark critical debate. To read more about the aae conference, review the draft schedule, and to register, visit: http://aaeconference2014.wordpress.com/

Submissions received in response to this call for submissions will be anonymised and posted for conference delegates to read, comment and respond to. ‘Build it with your eyes closed’ will make the process of blind peer review visible, tangible and social at the heart of the conference.

The contributions to ‘build it with your eyes closed’ will be developed for publication as a standalone book in 2015.

For more information about the project, please contact the editor, Dr. James Benedict Brown (Norwich University of the Arts, England) jamesbenedictbrown@yahoo.co.uk 

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Display Architecture: Department Stores and Modern Retail (July 2014)

Contacts: see below.
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 July 2014

The opening in the mid-nineteenth century of the first “cathedrals of consumption” that were the department stores gave birth to an array of strategies meant to enhance the presentation of merchandize. From new materials (glass and iron) and new lighting techniques (electricity) to new technologies of mobility (the elevator) and new spaces for socializing (art galleries, writing rooms, or dressing chambers), nothing was spared that could turn the heads of even the most adamant enemies of shopping. The store was for display and display made the store.

This volume seeks to explore the interior and exterior architecture of department stores in new ways. It departs from the premise that the presentation of merchandize cannot be separated from modern materials and building techniques that have been the preferred topics of art and architectural historians so far. Consequently, the volume proposes to challenge the traditional hierarchy of materials and to replace brick and mortar, paint and stone with artificial flowers, theatrical props, tantalizing fabrics and wax mannequins ­ which, together, form a real architecture of display. By asking scholars to engage with new materials and new media, the panel proposes to redefine commercial display design as an essential component of modern art and architecture.

Closed Systems / Open Worlds (August 2014)

Contact:  ClosedandOpenBook@gmail.com
Deadline for précis: 1 August 2014

Edited by: Jeremy Hunsinger (Wilfrid Laurier University), Jason Nolan (Ryerson University) & Melanie McBride (York University)

This book will consist of explorations at the boundaries of virtual worlds as enclosed but encouraging spaces for exploration, learning, and enculturation. Game/worlds like Second Life, OpenSim, Minecraft, and Cloud Party are providing spaces for the construction of alternatives and reimaginings, though frequently they end up more as reproductions. We seek to challenge those spaces and their creativities and imaginings.

Volume 2 of the International Handbook of Internet Research (June 2014)

Contact: internet.research.handbook@gmail.com
Deadline for abstracts for chapters: 1 June 2014
Deadline for full chapters: 1 September 2015

Editors: Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup, and Matthew Allen

After the remarkable success of the first International Handbook of Internet Research (2010), Springer has contracted with its editors to produce a second volume. This new volume will be arranged in three sections, that address one of three different aspects of internet research: foundations, futures, and critiques. Each of these meta-themes will have its own section of the new handbook.

A Thousand Platforms: Deep Teaching for Computational Media and Generalist Design (Aug 2014)

Website: http://rhizome.org/announce/opportunities/60235/view/
Deadline for abstracts: 1 Aug 2014

A Thousand Platforms: Deep Teaching for Computational Media and Generalist Design
Edited by Michael Filimowicz, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University

Today’s creators of interactive media “switch hardware and software tools like colors of paint.”[1] This edited collection focuses on undergraduate teaching and learning by bringing together essays addressing pedagogies that produce the fabled “unicorns” – graduates who can  Program, Design and Create. Curricula in computational media are faced with various challenges, such as (1) maintaining a balance between breadth and depth of specialist knowledge; (2) developing fluency in coding despite otherwise advanced technological creativity; or (3) the role of numeracy in visually-dominated media.

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.

Designing Experience: Call for Abstracts

Editor: Peter Benz (Academy of Visual Arts, HKBU)
“Designing Experience” (=working title) to be published in 2013, publisher not yet confirmed
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 Nov 2012
Contact: benz@hkbu.edu.hk

Background

Despite its omnipresence in marketing ‘lingo’ and usability forums Experience Design in many ways lacks professional and academic frameworks, in which research and developments of the area can be conducted, discussed, published and reviewed. It is therefore the aim of this project to establish a R&D community of academics and professionals interested in the exploration of issues in Experience Design; to provide them an online platform to develop their individual projects while engaging, interacting and communicating with likewise interested researchers and professionals; to additionally organise opportunities for offline interaction to strengthen the network; and through these efforts to ultimately clarify theoretical and methodological issues and advance our understanding of the potentials and limitations of the area.

For this purpose submissions are invited on significant, original, and previously unpublished research, case studies and potentially other – more experimental – research formats. Among issues that could be raised are the following:

· Experience, its principal definition and its distinction from other forms of human knowledge;
· Aesthetics, poetics and ethics as related in and through experience;
· Experience as a narrative form;
· Experience Design as a methodological system;
· Media of experience, or ‘experiential messages’;
· Experience as designed time;
· Identity: an experiential construct;
· Social, spatial and other contexts affecting experience;
· The Experience Society;
· Virtuality and representation: what remains after the experience.

Please submit an abstract of your proposed research/project/case study of no more than 500 words plus a bibliography by 30 November 2012 for peer-reviewing. Only English language abstracts (and papers) will be considered. The authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to join a closed online research group to subsequently collaboratively work on the further development of respective projects. By May 2013 each project should result in a full paper of maximum 4,000 words for publication in the book ‘Designing Experience’ (working title; publisher to be confirmed). Other non-traditional formats of submissions are also welcome – e.g. photo-essays, graphical experimentations – as long as they lend themselves to publication in a book.

For more information please visit here.

Book: Signs and Symbols in the Workplace and Public (Nov 2011)

Editors: Annie W.Y. Ng and Alan H.S. Chan
To be published by Nova Science Publishers in 2013
Deadline for abstracts: 30 Nov 2011
Contact: sswp2013@gmail.com

Objectives:
Signs and symbols are one of the possible safety precaution measures that can be taken to attempt to reduce accidents and injuries in workplaces and public areas. They are also used to deliver regulations, directions, navigations and guidance in all locations and all sectors where the public has access. In this book, we aim at gathering the latest research and case studies on the design, evaluation, planning and management of signs and symbols in workplaces and public areas. Readership is international and includes professionals like academics, ergonomists, designers, health and safety specialists, organizational psychologists, facilities practitioners, and urban and infrastructure planners would be of interest. The book is also aimed at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students who are taking a course in information design and facilities management. The book will be organized in self-contained chapters to provide greatest reading flexibility.