Curating Media and Design

New episode of podcast Medea Vox!Feeling at Home With Internet...

Wed, 18 May 2016 14:41:11 +0200

New episode of podcast Medea Vox!

Feeling at Home With Internet of Things: What new ways of being together will #IoT enable?

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or on SoundCloud or by using this feed in your favourite podcatcher.

New episode of the podcast Medea Vox!On the future of book...

Tue, 03 May 2016 09:52:05 +0200

New episode of the podcast Medea Vox!

On the future of book design, with author and designer Zach Dodson.

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or on SoundCloud or by using this feed in your favourite podcatcher.

It was recently discovered that common mealworms can biodegrade...

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 11:26:20 +0200

It was recently discovered that common mealworms can biodegrade styrofoam. In this episode of the podcast Medea Vox, we discuss how these plastic-eating worms might influence how we will live with—or without—plastics, and what it’s like to eat worms.

Call for Submissions: The Politics, Practices and Poetics of Openness

Mon, 04 May 2015 10:59:51 +0200

Scholars and practitioners are invited to contribute to an online publication entitled Openness: Politics, Practices and Poetics.

We seek to gather reflections and provocations from a diverse range of voices, inviting artists, computer programmers, activists, researchers, archivists, urban foragers or performers of all sorts, to join us in thinking critically about how openness is changing social values and influencing how information is shared. Can we reach a better understanding of data’s role in manipulating personal and collective forms of identification and behaviour?

Expression of interest is due 29 May 2015.

Read full call.

Papers: Transmedia Critical – Empirical Investigations into Multiplatform and Collaborative Storytelling

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 10:47:00 +0100

This special issue of International Journal of Communication (Vol 8, 2014) has several interesting articles related to ‘transmedia storytelling’. The articles explore how transmedial content is produced, used and interpreted in various contexts and by different actors.

The articles are quite tricky to find on IJOC’s website, so here’s a more convenient list of links to the individual articles:

CFP: The Virtuous Circle – Design Culture and Experimentation (due Nov 10)

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 11:44:52 +0200

How do the new design practices produce culture? And, how can this culture offer common horizons to the multiplicity of practices that take place in design activities?

Cumulus Milan 2015 – The Virtouos Circle Conference. June 3-7, 2015, Politecnico di Milano, Italy.

Submission of full papers: November 10, 2014.

The conference aims to investigate how design comes out of the interaction between a practice (which seeks to change the state of things) and a culture (which makes sense of this change). The way this happens evolves with time: practices and cultures evolve and so do the ways they interact; the attention that is paid at different moments to one or other of these interacting polarities also evolves. In the current period of turbulent transformation of society and the economy, it is important to go back and reflect on the cultural dimension of design, its capacity to produce not only solutions but also meanings, and its relations with pragmatic aspects. […]

Read full call: http://cumulusmilan2015.org/

Call for Submissions: Designing Commons – Commons for Design

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 12:47:21 +0200

This workshop at the Design Research Society’s 2014 conference aims to explore what professional designers and researchers, who operate in commons-like frameworks and aim to support collective action, could learn from the current Commons discourse and research.

The aim is to collaboratively develop a design research agenda to better understand the relationship between “commoning practices” and “collaborative design practices”.

Date: June 15, 2014
Place: Umeå University, Sweden
Context: Design Research Conference 2014

Submissions are due April 15—read full call.

The workshop is organized by, among others, Erling Björgvinsson and Anna Seravalli, School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, and Sanna Marttila, School of Art, Design and Architecture, Aalto University.

Papers: Design Practice Research Case Studies

Wed, 15 Jan 2014 15:19:22 +0100

This website has been created by the Design Practice Research Group at Loughborough Design School in response to the on-going debate about the nature and contribution of visually creative design practice to academic research. The aim of the DPR Case Studies is to provide examples of PhDs from around the world in which the researcher engaged in the practice of a visually creative design discipline to support data collection.

View: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/microsites/lds/dprg-casestudies/

MORE – This open access resource provides an overview of PhDs that necessitated and/or facilitated the researcher to engage in practice to support data collection. In addition to aims, objectives and research questions, the overview includes insights into the rationale for the inclusion of practice; how this differed from commercial practice; and the experience of the researcher as a practitioner before commencing the PhD.

A key feature of the DPR Case Studies is the inclusion of images of the design process plus final outcomes. Design disciplines currently represented in the case studies are fashion, graphic, industrial, interior, silversmithing/jewellery, textile and transport.

Hat tip to Jonas Löwgren for spotting this!

CFP: Things to Remember – Materializing Memories in Art and Popular Culture (due Jan 20)

Wed, 15 Jan 2014 15:08:51 +0100

Memory matters. It matters because memory brings the past into the present, and opens it up to the future. But it also matters literally, because memory is mediated materially. Materiality is the stuff of memory. Meaningful objects that we love (or hate) function not only as aide-mémoire but as memory itself. The international conference Things to Remember: Materializing Memories aims to explore a sustained focus on the materiality in and of memory.

International Conference Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, June 5-6, 2014

Proposals due Jan 20, 2014.

Read full call: http://www.ru.nl/hlcs/programma’s/things-to-remember/things-to-remember/

CFP: A Matter of Design – Making Society through Science and Technology

Wed, 15 Jan 2014 14:56:43 +0100

The 5th STS Italia Conference theme is design processes.

The 5 th STS Italia Conference will be held in Milan, Italy, June 12 through 14, 2014, by the Italian Society of Science and Technology Studies, in collaboration with the Politecnico di Milano Doctoral School in Design.

See CFPs for all 24 tracks: http://www.stsitalia.org/conferences/STSITALIA_2014/AMD_CfA_ENG.pdf

MORE – Design, on the one hand, is a process that gives rise both to artifacts and to their accompanying social networks, those that are brought about by the artifacts as well as those that make the artifacts possible. On the other hand, design processes cannot be explained as the result of independent, rational choices by isolated individuals, whether designers, producers or users. They are, rather, collective processes in which humans and nonhumans interact. When science and technology studies meet the latest design thinking, new scenarios and new perspectives arise for both these research communities. This occurs - as the many thematic sessions of the conference reveal - in studying communication tools, workplaces, robotics, innovation processes, smart fibers, medical products or even the human body. […]

CfP: Digital Archives and Open Archival Practices (due Feb 28)

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 13:36:57 +0100

This special issue of Convergence aims to bring together researchers, artists, professionals and practitioners from the field of digital archives and the archiving of practice with an emphasis upon Art, Design, Media, Film and Performing Arts disciplines. It specifically aims to explore the affordances of digital technologies upon archival practices.

Submissions due Feb 28, 2014. Special issue of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.

Full call: http://www.crmcs.sunderland.ac.uk/journals/convergence/digital-archives/

CfP: Democratization of Hacking & Making (due May 1)

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 13:33:00 +0100

Research on hacker culture has historically focused on a relatively narrow set of activities and practices related to open-source software, political protest, and criminality. Scholarship on making has generally been defined as hands-on work with a connection to craft. By contrast, “hacking” and “making” in the current day are increasingly inroads to a more diverse range of activities, industries, and groups. They may show a strong cultural allegiance or map new interpretations and trajectories.

Abstract submissions due May 1, 2014 (Special Issue of New Media & Society)

Full call: http://asistsigsi.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/cfp-democratization-of-hacking-and-making/

CfP: Designing Things Together – Intersections of Co-Design and Actor-Network Theory

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 12:35:49 +0100

In this call, we aim to create an opportunity for exchange and reflection on the interesting intersections between ANT and co-design. We seek theoretical discussions as well as empirical case studies carried out using methodologies underpinning the ANT approach. We seek reflections, connections and mutual influences; we seek new questions, a forward-looking attitude and constructive critical analysis.

Special Issue of CoDesign. Guest editors: Cristiano Storni, Dagny Stuedahl, Thomas Binder and Per Linde.

Full call: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cfp/ncdncfp.pdf

Submission of intentions to contribute: March 17, 2014

Book: Media and the City – Cosmopolitanism and Difference

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 12:02:53 +0100

With the majority of the world’s population now living in cities, questions about the cultural and political trajectories of urban societies are increasingly urgent. This book explores the global city as the site where these questions become most prominent.

Author: Myria Georgiou, Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Published by: Polity

MORE – As a space of intense communication and difference, the global city forces us to think about the challenges of living in close proximity to each other. Do we really see, hear and understand our neighbours? This engaging book examines the contradictory realities of cosmopolitanization as these emerge in four interfaces: consumption, identity, community and action. Each interface is analysed through a set of juxtapositions to reveal the global city as a site of antagonisms, empathies and co-existing particularities.

Academic papers: Communication and New Materialism

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 11:27:41 +0100

A recent issue of open-access journal “Communication +1” deals with the topic of New Materialism. They write:

“Given the recent emergence of new perspectives in critical theories, such as Object-Oriented Ontology, Speculative Realism, Alien Phenomenology, Flat Ontology, and associated research programs, this issue seeks to explore the implications of these perspectives for the study of communication and media. We use the term, New Materialism, broadly to include all the aforementioned as well as other related approaches in the hope to be as inclusive as possible and to encourage diverse voices and analytic angles that focus on the forms and processes of mediation across different fields. We are particularly interested in works that engage with the theoretical underpinnings of New Materialism to challenge the text-centered approaches in media and communication studies.”

View full issue: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol2/iss1/

Book: The Contemporary Theory of the Public Sphere

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 11:19:15 +0100

Normative democratic theory does not lie securely above societal argumentation but is instead a crucial part of it. We need to know not just how the public should reason, but how it actually does reason, or could reason in better foreseeable circumstances. After all, given the general societal and cosmopolitan challenges that we face, the health and the necessary extension of democracy fundamentally depends on the reasoning capacities of the public. The concept of the public sphere is intrinsic to understanding this process, but it has long been limited by its division into the twin approaches of normative argumentation in democratic theory and empirical-theoretical application in the social sciences. This book aims to go beyond this entrenched divide to show how democratic theory can become empirically applicable and the social sciences normatively relevant.

Author: Patrick O’Mahony, Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Sociology and Philosophy at University College Cork, Ireland.

Published by: Peter Lang

Book: Intensive Media – Aversive Affect and Visual Culture

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 21:04:00 +0100

This book seeks to understand the problematic encounter we have with experiences of suffering, the ‘aversive affects’ that trouble but also enliven, or intensify, media forms and communication processes. McCosker argues that as participants in global media and communication environments, our inherent vulnerability to the intensities and aversive affects of pain, while highly unpredictable, stands as both a requisite and catalyst for individual and collective thought and action in many key spheres of social life.

Author: Anthony McCosker lecturer in Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne

Published by: Palgrave Macmillan

More: There is something unsettling, but also powerful, in the encounter with individual and collective experiences of human suffering. Intensive Media explores the discomfort and fascination initiated by instances of pain and suffering, their ‘aversive affects’, as they trouble but also vitalise contemporary media environments. In the contexts of crisis, conflict and suffering explored throughout this book, aversive affect operates micropolitically to make explicit or hide the material conditions that surround instances of pain in all its specificity. In so many scenarios, personal, social and political stakes are set around the thresholds of intensity that give rise to encounters with the ‘sense’ of pain and the unpredictable valences of its aversive affects. McCosker’s case studies develop outwards from the middle of what has been referred to as ‘the problem of pain’, a problem that traverses media, communication, art, sociality and politics in their confrontation with affect, biology and neurophysiology.

View on Amazon

CFP: Participatory Design Conference 2014 – Reflecting Connectedness

Thu, 03 Oct 2013 11:52:43 +0200

The conference theme of PDC 2014 is “Reflecting connectedness”, a reaction to the technologically pushed trend in ‘being always connected’.

Submissions due Jan-Mar, 2014.

The 13th biennial Participatory Design Conference (PDC), Windhoek, Namibia, Oct 6-10, 2014.

View full call: http://www.pdc2014.org/

CFP: "Crafting Design" at the DIS conference

Thu, 03 Oct 2013 11:37:45 +0200

DIS is the an 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.

Submissions due Jan, 2014

ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), June 21-25, Vancouver, Canada.

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.

Read full call: http://dis2014.iat.sfu.ca/

CFP: Special Issue on Software Quality for Mobile Apps (due Nov 15)

Thu, 03 Oct 2013 11:31:48 +0200

By 2020, it has been predicted that all software will be developed for mobile devices. Although significant advances have been made exploring the issues involved in the design and development of mobile apps, comparatively little attention has been drawn to how well they are engineered. This special issue of Software Quality Journal will present a collection of high quality and thought provoking articles that consider how software quality can be fostered in the engineering of mobile apps.

Submissions due Nov 15, 2013

The topics addressed by this special issue include, but are not limited to:

Empirical studies informing mobile app design and engineering
Behavioural research on the design and development of mobile apps
Mobile applications usability evaluation: studies and techniques
Social and cultural aspects in mobile app engineering
Studies of mobile app stores
Development models in mobile app engineering
Reports on development cycles of mobile apps
Non-functional aspects (i.e. privacy and security) in mobile app engineering
Tools and applications to support mobile app engineering

See full call https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=bcs-hci;6d3a903c.1308