Social
Spaces

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.

SupraSpace: On the Concept of Space and Place in Art and Visual Culture
International Conference
Tel Aviv University, Art History Department

June 3 – 04, 2012
Deadline CFP: Jan 15, 2012

Keynote speaker: Prof. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Department of Art and
Archaeology, Princeton University

Space has been subject to aesthetic, art-historical, philosophical,
anthropological, geographical and political investigations, each with
its idiosyncratic definitions. Space maintains a close relation with
illusionism, narrativity, and the performative qualities of art.  Space
is especially interconnected with time, making it impossible to
separate one from the other. In the current dynamic reality in which we
live, it is hard to remain confined to just one modality of spatial
thinking that will capture all of its complexity; yet this problem is
not limited to our contemporary globalized moment, but is also relevant
to different historical periods. Consequently, in order to engage
effectively with the problem of space, recent studies have demonstrated
multiple methods of conceptualization, while emphasizing the
dialectical relations and tensions between them.
Within the realms of art and culture, the discourse on space has often
engaged with problems of representation (artistic genres such
landscape, narrative space, chronotopos, interior/exterior, etc), or
with political issues relating to territorial conflicts and borders.

The ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) welcomes submissions (papers, workshops, demonstrations, …)  from a broad range of researchers and practitioners within the field of interactive systems design research and practice.

DIS 2012 encourages submissions that consider the following:

- Contexts: Places, people, communities, events, and phenomena
- Values: Experience, aesthetics, engagement, empowerment, health, wellbeing,
designing things that matter, sustainability, and diversity
- Processes: Methods tools and techniques for engaging people, researching
and designing, and co-designing interactive systems.
-Technologies: Sensors and actuators, mobile devices, multi touch and
touchless interaction, social media, personal, community, and public displays

For more information and deadlines, consult the conference website.