AIEDAM Vol 30 No 3: Special Issue – System Architecture Design (April 2015)

Website: http://aiedam.usc.edu/index.php/SpecialIssues/Vol30No3
Deadline for submissions: 30 April 2015

Guest Editors: Claudia Eckert & Marija Jankovic

In the early design stages of design processes system architecture defines the interaction between product, process and company organization as well as the integration across different domains of design such as mechanical, electrical, software engineering. During system architecture design, companies decide the balance between innovative and incremental development. System architecture decisions impact fundamentally on overall project and company success, especially in complex systems.

Relating Systems Thinking and Design 4: At the Frontiers of Systemic Design (September 2015, Banff Alberta Canada)

Dates: 1-3 September 2015
Location: Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada
Website: www.systemic-design.net
Deadline for submission of abstracts: UPDATED 15 March 2015

For 3 years the Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD) symposium has convened scholars, design researchers, and serious practitioners to articulate and demonstrate the shared value of a transdisciplinary field with applications across all complex systems and services.  We invite participation for RSD4 from all those working at the frontiers of systemic design – those leading real projects informed by systemic and complexity theories, and those researching systemic behaviours within real-world complexity, services and systems.

Algorithmic Practices: Emergent interoperability in the everyday (Sep 2015, Exeter UK)

Dates: 2-4 September 2015
Location: University of Exeter, UK
Website: http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+international+conference.htm
Deadline for submissions: 6 Feb 2015

Sponsored by: The History and Philosophy of Geography Study Group

An ever-increasing proportion of the interactions that we have with digital platforms, apps and devices are mediated according to complex algorithms. Whether it be the real time analytics that draw us into playing a game on our phone, or tailored recommendations built from our historical searching and buying habits, we structure our daily lives in response to ‘performative infrastructures’ (Thrift, 2005: 224), most of them hidden deliberately by their makers.

CHI 2015 Workshop: Ecological perspectives in HCI: Promise, Problems, and Potential (April 2015, Seoul Korea)

Dates: 18-19 April 2015
Location: Seoul, Korea
Website: http://rizzo.media.unisi.it/EPCHI2015
Deadline for submissions: EXTENDED 19 January 2015

Given the important, and ever increasing, role played by “ecology” and related terms in HCI, there is a need for the field to reflect on the history and state of the art in employing ecological concepts and perspectives, and outline directions for future development. This one-day workshop will contribute to addressing this need by providing a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss the promise, problems, and potential of ecological perspectives in HCI.

The aim of the workshop is to reflect on interpretations and uses of ecology and related concepts in HCI research and explore the future of ecological perspectives in HCI.  In particular, the participants will discuss the potential of ecological perspectives for supporting rich and meaningful analysis, as well as innovative design, of interactive technologies in real-life contexts.

Living Machines IV: 4th Intl Conf on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems (July 2015, Barcelona Spain)

Dates: 27-31 July 2015
Location: La Pedrera, Barcelona, Spain, in association with Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Website: http://csnetwork.eu/livingmachines
Deadline for submissions: UPDATED 31 March 2015

Accepted papers will be published in Springer Lecturer Notes in Artificial Intelligence.

The development of future real-world technologies will depend strongly on our understanding and harnessing of the principles underlying living systems and the flow of communication signals between living and artificial systems.

Biomimetics is the development of novel technologies through the distillation of principles from the study of biological systems. The investigation of biomimetic systems can serve two complementary goals. First, a suitably designed and configured biomimetic artefact can be used to test theories about the natural system of interest. Second, biomimetic technologies can provide useful, elegant and efficient solutions to unsolved challenges in science and engineering. Biohybrid systems are formed by combining at least one biological component—an existing living system—and at least one artificial, newly-engineered component. By passing information in one or both directions, such a system forms a new hybrid bio-artificial entity.

ACE’14 Workshop on Designing Systems for Health and Entertainment: What Are We Missing (Nov 2014, Madeira Portugal)

Dates: 11 November 2014
Location: Madeira, Portugal
Website: http://designingsystemsforhealthandentertainment.wordpress.com/
Deadline for submissions: 19 September 2014

In conjunction with ACE 2014: http://www.ace2014.info/

Systems that aggregate health and entertainment goals are proliferating, but little is known about the way to design and evaluate these systems and how to manage the different (if nor opposite) needs of these two main areas. This workshop will promote the discussion of issues surrounding these areas, enabling a better understanding of the how’s and why’s of designing systems for health and entertainment, as well as the identification of new avenues of research in the field.

Therefore we invite designers, researchers and practitioners to participate in an exciting full-day workshop where they are invited to share their personal views and research on the intersection of technology, health and entertainment.

Design Ecologies: Challenging anthropocentrism in the design of sustainable futures (June 2015, Stockholm)

Dates: 7-10 June 2015
Location: Konstfack – University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. Stockholm, Sweden
Website: http://nordes.org/nordes2015
Deadline for submissions: 7 January 2015

Design hinges a natural-artificial continuum through humans’ natural capacity to produce what we call ‘the artificial’. At a time when human activity is threatening biodiversity and causing severe climate change, it becomes obvious that natural and artificial systems can no longer be conceived in isolation but only in relation to each other – or indeed as one.

The coupling of natural and artificial systems poses challenges due to its complexity and partly reveals the anthropocentrism that has traditionally characterised design. Several questions arise in this context. How can design practices embrace pluralism by recognising, in the manifestation of design itself, biological as well as cultural diversity? In other words, how do we in design, and beyond, move from the kind of ego-system we seem to be so trapped in towards the kind of eco-system everyone and everything can gain from? How are designers, educators and researchers of design currently engaging with these challenges, and how might or should they engage with them in the near future? Designers in Scandinavia have shaped and influenced many local human societies to an important extent through a legacy of democratic and user-centred values. How can these be extended to acknowledge and celebrate humans’ cohabitation on a global scale to also include the myriad of all other existing species and systems at alternative scales in time and space? How can the various design practices be genuinely sensitive to ecological complexity? And how can they be understood, designed and studied in relation to each other – or indeed as a whole?

Relating Systems Thinking and Design 3 (Oct 2014, Oslo Norway)

Dates: 15-17 October 2014
Location: Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway
Website: http://systemic-design.net/rsd3-2014/
Deadline for submission of abstracts: UPDATED 16 April 2014

The emerging renaissance of systems thinking in design responds to the increasing complexity in all challenges faced by designers, strategists, and transdisciplinary innovators. We are facing deeply entangled problematics in natural, social, economic, and political systems. Our professional and organizational worlds have become too complex for linear goal-driven management, and the solution of conventional design thinking is insufficient to address complexity across domains, scales, and networks. New thinking, new knowledge, and new forms of intervention are required to take on this web of interconnected challenges.

The theme for Relating Systems Thinking and Design 3, to be held in Oslo in October 2014, is: Knowledge of Forms and Forms of Knowledge.

2014 IEEE Intl Conf on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (Oct 2014, San Diego California)

Dates: 5-8 October 2014
Location: Paradise Point Resort and Spa, San Diego, California
Website: http://www.smc2014.org
Deadline for submission of papers, posters, etc: 7 April 2014

SMC 2014 is the annual flagship conference of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society. It provides an international forum for researchers and practitioners to report up-to-the-minute innovations and developments, summarize state-of-the-art, and exchange ideas and advances in all aspects of systems science and engineering, human machine systems, and cybernetics.

Designing Interactive Systems 2014 (June 2014, Vancouver Canada)

Dates: 21-25 June 2014
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Website: http://www.dis2014.org
Deadline for submissions: 19 January 2014, 11:59 PT

The ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) is the premier, international arena where designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, systems engineers and many more come together to debate and shape the future of interactive systems research, design, and practice.

The theme of the conference is “Crafting Design.” We see the confluence of phenomena that may constitute new approaches and new foci in HCI and interaction design. The re-emergence of hand skills is evident in the development of multi-touch and full body interfaces. DIY and Maker cultures have become a widespread phenomenon in which craftsmanship of the maker matters. Wearable computing revisits the use of traditional craft in new way and the (technologically) self-constructed self is another kind of democratic craft. Documentations of the self where we create enduring records of everything from social encounters to our heart-rates become designed vehicles for abstract mirrors of the self.