ServDes 2016 (May 2016, Copenhagen)

Dates: 24-26 May 2016
Location: Aalborg University-Copenhagen
Website: http://www.servdes.org/
Deadline for submissions: 29 September 2015

ServDes, the Service Design and Innovation conference, is the premier research conference for exchanging knowledge within Service Design and service innovation studies. Born as a yearly Nordic conference, ServDes has now become a bi-annual international event with the aim of bringing researchers and practitioners together to discuss, share and evolve the emerging discipline of Service Design, and design-related service innovation.

Product Lifetimes and the Environment Conference (PLATE), Nottingham, June 17-19 2015

Nottingham Trent University is delighted to invite you to register for PLATE, the first international conference to examine product lifetimes and the environment in the context of sustainability.

The conference will open on Wednesday 17 June with keynotes from:

• Dr Conny Bakker, Associate Professor of Design for Sustainability at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
• Sarah Clayton, Head of Products and Services, WRAP, UK

The first day will end with a welcome evening reception to be held in Nottingham Trent University’s historic Old Chemistry Theatre.

Over three days academics and other experts will present papers and workshops addressing the subject of product lifetimes and the environment from a varied range of disciplines and international perspectives.  An exhibition will run alongside the conference.

Subsequent keynotes will be given by:

• Dr Ruth Mugge, Associate Professor in Consumer Research, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
• Kyle Wiens, Co-founder, iFixit, USA
• Professor Tim Cooper, Professor of Sustainable Design and Consumption, Nottingham Trent University, UK

On Thursday 18 June we will host the PLATE gala dinner in the atmospheric setting of St. Mary’s Church, in the heart of Nottingham’s historic lace market.

Book your place

The deadline for early bird registration is fast approaching – 30 April 2015. For further details and booking please see our website.

Fashion: Now & Then: Passé, Presente, 未来 (Oct 2015, New York, USA)

Dates: 22-24 October 2015
Location: LIM College, New York City, NY, U.S.A.
Website: http://fashionnowandthen.blogspot.com/
Deadline for submission of proposals: 8 June 2015

The Adrian G. Marcuse Library at LIM College invites participation in the fifth annual Fashion: Now & Then Conference, a three day conference in which participants will discuss the past, present, and future uses of fashion information and the global reach that the fashion industry possess. Participants will be drawn from the fashion industry, libraries, archives, academic institutions, publishers, collectors, and museums to represent a full range of expertise.

Face Forward 2015 (Dec 2015, Dublin Ireland)

Dates: 11-12 December 2015
Location: School of Creative Arts and Media, Dublin Institute of Technology, Grangegorman, Dublin 7, Ireland
Website: http://www.irishdesign2015.ie/programme/single/face-forward
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 May 2015

Face Forward is an international peer-reviewed conference focused on typography that seeks to examine design and typographic practice, and to make explicit existing connections between craft, research, theory, history, criticism and pedagogy. This conference aims to provoke informed, rigorous and critical debate on aspects of typographic research and practice that relate to current discourse and contexts. It is the inaugural event in what will become an annual international conference. This year’s conference is supported by ID2015 Year of Irish Design and the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Include 2015: Disruptive Ideas in Inclusive Design (Sep 2015, London UK)

Dates: 17-18 September 2015
Location: Royal College of Art, London, UK
Website: http://www.rca.ac.uk/research-innovation/helen-hamlyn-centre/include/include-2015/
Deadline for submissions: 27 April 2015

Organised by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art.

Ever since the international inclusive design community first came together around the needs of older and disabled people for the inaugural Include conference in 2001, a series of disruptions have moved the tectonic plates under the field. Definitions of inclusive design have expanded, new directions have proliferated and the rapid emergence of new technologies has altered the landscape too. Co-design, co-creation and crowdsourcing have re-cast the relationship between designers and users; social innovation and digital manufacture have raised new agendas.As a result, the pluralistic world of inclusive design now looks very different from the picture at the turn of the new millennium. Keynote speakers will be speaking about Disruptive Ideas on Day 1 and include Marco Steinberg, Snowcone & Haystack, Finland and Liza Chong, INDEX, Denmark (see http://tinyurl.com/khzjufv to see all confirmed keynotes).

The Illustrator as Public Intellectual (Nov 2015, Rhode Island School of Design, USA)

Dates: 6-7 November 2015:
Location: Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, USA
Website: http://illustrationresearch.co.uk/index.php/call-papers-illustrator-public-intellectual/
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 June 2015

Keynote Speaker: Rick Poynor
Visiting Professor in Critical Writing in Art & Design at the
Royal College of Art London

Illustrators and all who study their work have long understood the importance of pictures to communicate ideas and shape opinion, and to possibly provoke the viewer in unpredictable ways. What should illustrators say in the public sphere? What forces limit the illustrator’s expression of thought? What are the key issues and debates around the communication of ideas through illustration?

Unfrozen – 1st SDN Design Research Winter Summit (Jan 2016, Switzerland)

Dates: 28-31 January 2016
Location: Swiss Alps, details TBA
Website: http://www.swissdesignnetwork.ch/
Deadline for submission of abstracts & workshop proposals: UPDATED: 4 May 2015

Unfrozen – First SDN Design Research Winter Summit January 28-31 2016

After three years in hibernation, the Swiss Design Network invites you to Unfrozen, the 9th SDN Symposium and the 1st SDN Design Research Winter Summit – January, 28-31 2016. Whether you are uncovering gems from the glaciers of design history, exploring the melting snowcaps of design’s changing climate, or riding the fresh powder of emerging trends, we welcome submissions exploring this metaphor. You are free to submit your work for the platform of your choice : as a classical lecture, a workshop, a fireside talk, or to suggest an alternative form.

Spaces & Flows: 6th Intl Conf on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies (Oct 2015, Chicago USA)

Dates: 15-16 October 2015
Location: University Center Chicago, Chicago, USA
Website: http://spacesandflows.com/the-conference/call-for-papers
Deadline for submission of proposals: 16 April 2015 (there will be further rounds)

Theme: Decline Belt Cities and Places: Prospects, Problems, Possibilities

This conference aims to critically engage the contemporary and ongoing spatial, social, ideological, and political transformations in a transnational, global, and neoliberal world. In a process-oriented world of flows and movement, we posit, the global north and global south now simultaneously converge and diverge in a dialectic that shapes and transforms cities, suburbs, and rural areas. This conference addresses the mapping of, the nature of, and the forces that propel these processural changes.

See the website for further details.

Material Environments: Sensing Time and Matter in Digital and Visual Culture (London, UK)

Dates: 24-25 July 2015
Location: University of Greenwich, UK
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 18 April 2015

This conference seeks to explore the points of intersection at which the material and the digital, matter and the virtual, and embodiment and posthumanism push against each other in visual media. Through encounters with cinema, artist’s film and video, installations, and online archives, the aim of the conference is to conceive of new relationships between temporality, materiality and affectivity, tracing the ways in which matter becomes meaningful, or comes to resist meaning, in the digital age. We hope to illuminate the new ways in which digital experiences allow us to think and sense matter and materiality, while reassessing the role of non-digital media in this equation. The conference will trace the implications of the posthuman turn in the humanities, understood as encompassing a variety of non-anthropocentric approaches, on our understanding of matter and affect in visual culture.

The Conference particularly welcomes papers that explore the following:

•       the relationship between image and environment, the materiality of filmed nature, and the ‘ecological turn’ in theory and philosophy
•       non-anthropocentric and posthuman approaches to visual media, particularly as they affect our understanding of materiality, mortality, and ethics
•       the relationship between posthumanism, materiality and embodiment
•       the ways in which the digital has reconfigured our understanding of temporality, spatiality, memory and archiving
•       the impact of the digital on engagements with non-linear storytelling and locative narratives.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Professor Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, University of London
http://www.joannazylinska.net/
Professor David Martin-Jones, University of Glasgow
http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/cca/staff/davidmartin-jones/
Dr Felicity Colman, Manchester School of Art
http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/fcolman

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words by 18th April 2015 to calls@timadi.org with ‘Material Environments’ in the subject line.

This Conference is sponsored by the ‘Time, Materiality and the Digital’ (TiMaDi) research group at the University of Greenwich, and organised by Matilda Mroz, Isil Onol, Stacey Pitsillides, and Rosamund Davies.

10th Intl Conf on Design Principles and Practices (Feb 2016, Rio de Janeiro Brazil)

Dates: 25-27 February 2016
Location: Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Website: http://designprinciplesandpractices.com/the-conference-2016/?mid=906687947&ml=29564323
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 25 April 2015 (there will be future rounds)

We welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines and perspectives and encourage faculty and research students to jointly submit proposals, discussing design principles and practices through one of the following themes:

Theme 1: Design Education
Theme 2: Design in Society
Theme 3: Designed Objects
Theme 4: Visual Design
Theme 5: Design Management and Professional Practice
Theme 6: Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design