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The special session Design Culture for Ageing Well: Designing for ‘Situated Elderliness’ aims to open upinterdisciplinary discussions between social scientists, seniors’ association members, healthcare practitioners, researchers and practitioners from human-computer interaction, ambient assisted living and related fields, and other interested persons. The special session aims to bring together people from diverse backgrounds.

Roles of “diversity”, “heterogeneity” and “abilities” will be core themes, based on an ability-based understanding of aging and situated elderliness. The organizers invite position papers that focus on topics related to “ageing well”, “ambient assisted living” or similar.

Dates: 1-3 July 2013
Location: Maribor, Slovenia at SouthCHI2013 (http://southchi.org/).
Website: http://designcultureforageingwell.wordpress.com/
Deadline for submissions: 5 March 2013

“The aesthetic power of feeling”, wrote the late Félix Guattari, seems to be “on the verge of occupying a privileged position within the collective assemblages of enunciation of our era.” In discerning a “new aesthetic paradigm” he was not anticipating something along the lines of the primacy of the institutionalised arts within the social field, but rather a kind of “proto-aesthetic paradigm”, traversing all universes of value and existential territories, from the arenas of science and the ethico-political, to the modalities and practices of subjectivation. This general aestheticisation which Guattari had in mind at the end of the 1980s may be regarded as one of the first descriptions of a fundamental upheaval in the history of technology and sensation, a change taking place during the second half of the twentieth century, but especially since the 1990s, and one which potentially shifts the meaning of aesthetics as such: under the new media-technological conditions we observe a proto-aesthetic dressing of the present.

This special issue of ZfM sets out to clarify the historical-systematic contours as well as the political implications of the new aesthetic paradigm. This necessitates focusing on the key technical-medial scenes of the current sensorial caesura, outlining the associated conceptual challenges and issues of politics of terminology, in order thereby to contribute to the redescription of media-aesthetics under technological conditions, in particular those of the new era of social and mobile media in the network age.

Text submissions (around 25,000 characters, notes and spaces included), by the end of August 2012, to: erich.hoerl@ruhr-uni-bochum.de

This special issue of ZfM will be published in April 2013. The language of publication is German. Papers are accepted in German, English and French; papers will be translated after peer-review and acceptance.

http://www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de/index.php?TID=71

This special issue of the journal invites papers, projects and reviews exploring and developing the notion of Design Fictions. One of the early proponents of Design Fictions, the author Bruce Sterling, said that design: “seeks out ways to jump over its own conceptual walls – scenarios, user observation, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, critical design, speculative design” (Sterling, 2009). Despite the current burgeoning of this field and its various histories and antecedents, the coming together of design and fiction, as ‘design fictions’, remains relatively underexplored.

Design Fictions might also be sensed as a ‘speculative turn’ in design practice, founding a new engagement in ‘prototyping’ conjectural projections of designed futures. In the context of ever-present near futures, projected as scenarios that threaten radical ruptures of the real, digital creativity expands into a post-digital cybernetics. Design Fictions speculative design methodologies take their cue from science fiction, Sterling however would also have it the other way around, saying that: “design and literature don’t talk together much, but design has more to offer literature at the moment than literature can offer design” (Sterling, 2009).

This issue seeks to put design and literature into conversation. The journal wishes to ask how Design Fictions and related methodological work have mutated or glitched across art, design and architecture, for example in response to ‘design fictions’ (Nokia/Bleecker); in ‘critical design’ (Dunne & Raby); in speculative and visionary architecture (Spiller); in science fiction as prototyping (Intel/Johnson); and in ethnographic work on design and prototyping (Kelty).

Deadline for extended abstracts: 5 March 2012
Website: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/NDCR

Publication about this call in Wired: http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/12/design-fiction-digital-creativity-special-issue-on-design-fictions/

The 10th European Academy of Design Conference – Crafting the Future – has as conference theme: designer´s practice knowledge. Or how can the specific knowledge of designers be brought forward, articulated, made visible and be understood and used in contexts like innovation, business development and social change?

The conference will take place in Gothenburg (Sweden), from 17-19 April 2013.

The organizing committee is pleased to invite proposals for papers to the following tracks:

1. Designing Future Mobility
2. Design Development of Future Homes for Future Cities
3. Design and Innovation
4. MAKING TOGETHER – Open, Connected, Collaborative
5. The craft of design in design of service
6. Fashion Design for Sustainability
7. Design history as a tool for better design
8. Power to the People: Practices of Empowerment through Craft
9. Design & Craft (Crafting the Education of Design)

For more information and timing, consult the conference website

The 8th International Conference on Design and Emotion, with the theme ‘Out Of Control‘, will be organised in Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, London (UK) on the 11th-14th September 2012. The conference is a forum held where practitioners, academics and industry meet and exchange knowledge and insights concerning the cross-disciplinary field of design and emotion.

Currently, the organising committee is looking for researchers, academics and practitioners to submit proposals for the papers, case studies, workshops & masterclasses on various themes.

For more information and deadlines, consult the conference website.