DIS’12 Workshop: Re-conceptualizing Fashion in Sustainable HCI (June 2012, Newcastle UK)

Date: June 12, 2012
Location: Newcastle, UK
Website: http://dis12fashion.wordpress.com/
Deadline for workshop submissions: UPDATED: 23 March 2012

We don’t ordinarily think of fashion as a positive force for sustainable practices in the design of products and services. One imagines that fashion drives consumption and premature obsolescence at the expense of efficient use of resources. However, fashion exists in various aspects of our lives. A breadth of cultural and sociological research has shown that fashion plays an essential role in influencing consumer behavior and culture. Also, fashion-oriented design encourages ingenuity, imagination and innovation, which are crucial elements in pushing forward technological and social progress. In this workshop, we intend to explore the question of whether it is possible to re-conceptualize fashion in a way that helps us understand how to design to make sustainable practices natural and fashionable.

Participants in the workshop will collaborate in a practical exercise to act as a stimulus for thought concerning how the notion of fashion affects people’s behaviors and attitudes toward digital consumption. Participants will also share a reflection about their own personal experience of fashion as it relates to sustainability.

We hope to bring together a diverse group of HCI researchers and practitioners, as well as academics and practitioners from disciplines such as design, IT management, computer science, cultural studies, social sciences, and humanities.

We encourage submissions of short position papers (2-4 pages), demonstrations, photo essays or design briefs relevant to the relationship of fashion and sustainability in the IT industry. Some potentially relevant topics for submissions include:

• The history of fashion, especially with respect to IT.
• The social significance of fashion.
• The psychological significance of fashion.
• The economic significance of fashion.
• The relationship of fashion’s quest for extremes and the use of extreme examples as a legitimate and important aspect of science.
• How fashion varies from culture to culture.
• Exemplars and patterns of fashion-related sustainable design.

Please email submissions and questions to: dis12fashion@gmail.com.

Submissions will be reviewed by the organizers, and 15-20 will be accepted. Accepted submissions will be placed on the workshop website, along with links to relevant literature.

ORGANIZERS

Yue Pan, Human-Computer Interaction Design, Indiana University Bloomington, US
David Roedl, Human-Computer Interaction Design, Indiana University Bloomington, US
Eli Blevis, Human-Computer Interaction Design, Indiana University Bloomington, US
John C. Thomas, IBM T.J. Watson Research, US