Several of the workshops in the Communities and Technologies 2007 Conference may be of interest, in particular Digital Cities 5: Urban Informatics, Locative Media and Mobile Technology in Inner-City Developments; Organizers: Marcus Foth and Fiorella De Cindio.

The workshops for the Communities and Technologies 2007 Conference are now announced on the C&T web site.

All workshops are actively soliciting participants now. This year’s workshops include:

1. Community Informatics Beyond the Case Study: Using the TOP Data Archive; Organizers: Kate Williams and Ann Bishop
2. BOF - Between Ontologies and Folksonomies: Tools and Architectures for Managing and Retrieving Emerging Knowledge in Communities; Organizers: Dario Maggiorini, Alessandro Provetti, and Laura Anna Ripamonti
3. Past, Present, and Future Impacts of Communication Technologies on Healthcare Communities; Organizers: Pamela Whitten, Michael Mackert, and Lorraine Buis
4. Digital Cities 5: Urban Informatics, Locative Media and Mobile Technology in Inner-City Developments; Organizers: Marcus Foth and Fiorella De Cindio
5. Studying Interaction in Online Communities: From Data Sources to Research Results; Organizers: Thomas Lento, Howard Welser, Eric Gleave, and Marc Smith
6. Communities of Practice in Highly Computerized Work Settings; Organizers: Aditya Johri and Volker Wulf
7. ICT for Business Clusters in Emerging Markets, Organizers: Souyma Roy, Shantanu Biswas, and Kurt DeMaagd
8. Social construction and implications of research infrastructures; Organizers: Peter van den Besselaar and Rob Proctor
9. The paradox of communication: Towards a society of inattention? Organizer: Filippo Dal Fiore
10. Memory practices in computer-mediated communities: a research methods workshop, Elisabeth Davenport and Howard Rosenbaum
11. Public Practices, Social Software: Examining social practices in networked publics, Organizers: danah boyd, Nicole Ellison, and Scott Golder
12. Coaching community leaders on community cultivation and technology integration, Organizers: John D. Smith and Lauren B. Klein
13. Implicit Online Communities, Organizers: Mu Xia and Wenjing Duan

Conference website: http://ebusiness.tc.msu.edu/cct2007/

Discursive formations - Place, Narrative and Digitality in the Museum of the Future

Call for participation and collaboration

We would like to invite you participate in the “Discursive Formations - Place, Narrative and Digitality in the Museum of the Future” pilot project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, UK). This is a collaboration between several institutions within the University of Cambridge: the Digital Studio of the Department of Architecture, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Computer Laboratory.

The pilot project consists primarily of three interconnected workshops that will address the relationship between digitality and the Museum of the Future with an emphasis on the role of the moving image. The project aims to provoke interdisciplinary exchange, generate new design ideas and serve as a catalyst for future collaborations.

We would also like to take this opportunity to introduce http://moodle.expressivespace.org as a space for collaboration in practice-based research. “Discursive Formations” is the first project hosted by this new resource.

Project themes:

• ubiquitous computing; tangible interfaces
• pervasive, online, embodied narrative; expressive space
• real-time environments; video and pervasive games
• ephemeral, generative and adaptive architecture

Applicants are welcome to extend this list.

Important dates:

• Workshop application deadline: 1 March 2007
• Workshop acceptance deadline: 9 March 2007
• Workshop I: 16 March 2007
• Workshop II: 19 - 21 March 2007
• Workshop III: 21 - 23 March 2007
• Plenary session I: 21 March 2007 (pm)
• Plenary session II: 14 May 2007 (pm)

For details, see the link below.

Link: http://moodle.expressivespace.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=2#2

The Second Call for Papers of EuropIA.11.

Digital Thinking in Architecture, Civil Engineering, Archaeology, Urban Planning and Design : Finding the Ways

New digital cultures bring inevitable changes to our world and to the techniques, research methods and practices of design. The computer technology transforms slowly but surely the professions of environmental planning, architecture, archaeology and design. In recent years, we witness the emergence of digital methods using computer not only for facilitating technical tasks, but also to analyse project’s performance or amplify the creative thinking of designers. Educating the future professionals has become a real challenge due to the clash between fast developing technology and slower evolving new design thinking and values redefinition. Confronting multi-disciplinary theoretical, teaching and practice experiences at the Europia11, will help finding the ways to the future of design.

Link: http://europia11.free.fr/

Logo Cities: An International Symposium on Signage, Branding, and Lettering in Public Space

May 4-5, 2007
Concordia University, Montréal, Québec

Cities are awash in ‘public lettering’: street signs, newspaper mastheads, road signs, high-rise corporate logos, store/shop/restaurant signs, engravings on buildings and monuments, etc. They are at once branding and promotional devices; names (of buildings); labels; locating devices; material and technological artifacts; pieces of graphic, typographic, and industrial design; architectural heritage; industrial detritus; personal and cultural narratives. They are also intricately linked to the dominant preoccupations of the city: high-rise logos, for example, eloquently describe the commercial, financial, civic, even religious priorities of a particular urban locale – especially at night.

It is all the more surprising, given their sheer ubiquity, that signs have received relatively little coordinated attention – critical, creative, or otherwise. The Logo Cities symposium aims to draw together scholars, designers, artists, and artisans to foster an informed, critical dialogue about signage, branding, and lettering in public space. We invite expressions of interest and proposals for scholarly papers, panels, artworks and screenings that critically and creatively interrogate the intersections of signage, branding and lettering in public space – in any local, regional, national, or international contexts. We are especially interested in historical case studies; design and typographic studies; activist, artistic, and new media interventions; and, critical cultural analyses that offer new and adventurous insights into these phenomena from anywhere in the world. (NB We are less interested in advertising billboards and graffiti, given the substantial attention they have already received.)

Logo Cities will be held on the downtown campus of Concordia University, Montréal, May 4/5 2007. The event will include an art exhibition of creative works focusing on signage and lettering, alongside examples of old and new signs from around the city. The symposium will close with the Québec premiere of Helvetica, a new documentary film exploring the history and significance of this archetypal Modernist typeface which, for half a century, has been a ubiquitous presence in print and on signage in city streets, train stations and airports across the world. This screening of Helvetica will be introduced by the film’s director, Gary Hustwit.

The deadline for formal proposals is February 28, 2007. For more information and continual updates please visit the official symposium website. The website also features work derived from Logo Cities: Montréal, a research/creation project focusing on signage, branding and lettering in the city of Montréal.

Link: http://www.logocities.org/article/2/logo-cities-a-symposium-on-signage-branding-and-lettering-in-public-space

Call for papers: Parallel Session on “Mobile sharing applications for nomad and peripatetic storytellers” at HCII 2007.
http://www.hcii2007.org/

This parallel session aims to present research addressing innovative data gathering, evaluation and participatory design techniques to develop pervasive interactive multimedia systems that enable the creation and sharing of stories. Supporting and encouraging creativity, collaborative work and socializing. It looks at presenting significant projects and studies carried out in academia and in industry aiming to make new media technologies more enjoyable for the nomadic and peripatetic user by showcasing new relevant solutions that extend the field of action of people on the move improving, at the same time, the quality of the experience with them. The objectives are to understand how nomadic cultures can shape trends in technology, to analyze how sociability can be achieved in nomadic contexts, to unfold the futures of mobile TV, to explore the user-experience in pervasive interactive multimedia systems in general, to design applications to encourage the creation of Mobile Communities, to analyze how mobile digital content could evolve and to examine advanced interaction modalities for handhelds and ambient deployments.

Submission

Authors are invited to submit on or before January 22, 2006, the title of their proposal and full contact details. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by January 29, 2007 about the status of their proposals. Full papers are expected to be submitted by April 30, 2007. All submitted papers will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis.

Organizers

Dr. Anxo Cereijo Roibas, University of Brighton
Riccardo Sala, Dare

Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word document) to: a.c.roibas at brighton.ac.uk

Tommi Ilmonen successfully defended his thesis “Tools and Experiments in Multimodal Interaction” 14.12.2006 in Espoo, Finland. The opponent was Michael Cohen from Aizu University, Japan. Tommi is currently working in IPCity for workpackages 5 and 7. The dissertation is available on-line in the address:

http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2006/isbn9512285517/

Currently only the overview is in the Web, but the articles should follow in a few weeks.

3rd International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness
September 20th-21st, 2007
Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich, Germany
http://loca2007.context-aware.org

The 2007 Symposium on Location and Context Awareness seeks new and significant research on systems, services, and applications to detect, interpret and use of location and other contextual information. Context includes users’ activities, goals, abilities, preferences, interruptibility, affordances, and surroundings. With context, we can expect computers to deliver information, services, and entertainment in a way that maximizes convenience and minimizes intrusion. Developing awareness involves research in sensing, inference, data representation, and design.

Topic Areas:
We seek technical papers describing original, previously unpublished research results. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Sensing location and context
• Inference techniques for context from low-level sensor data
• Privacy and sharing of location and context information
• User studies of location- and context-aware systems

Dates:

• Submission Deadline: May 29, 2007
• Author Notification: July 3, 2007
• Camera-Ready Version: July 10, 2007
• Symposium: Sept. 20-21, 2007

Keho is a new online magazine for the Presence research community. It is the e-zine of Peach, a European project aimed at supporting Presence research. The first issue of Keho will be available to download from the Peach website www.peachbit.org in Spring 2007. A sample issue is online now.

Contribute

Keho is looking for input from people working in the field of Presence. Do you have news about an interesting project or an event to share, an opinion about the direction Presence research is, or should be, taking, or perhaps an idea for a feature on Presence research in action? We would welcome your suggestions for articles for Keho. If you would like to contribute to the first issue please get in touch with the editor, before January 31st, i.helgason at napier.ac.uk or have a look at the Keho wiki: http://keho.pbwiki.com

Subscribe

If you would like to be notified when the first issue of Keho is available please subscribe to the mailing list at keho at peachbit dot org

Keep us in touch

We would like to be kept in touch with your activities. If you have a news mailing list please add the Keho editor: i.helgason at napier.ac.uk

About Peach

Peach is an EU-funded, Sixth Framework Programme Coordination Action on Presence, which aims to promote and support the networking and coordination of research and innovation activities. Its objective is to stimulate structure and support the Presence research community, with special attention to the challenges associated to the interdisciplinary character of the field. Secondly, because Presence research is set to produce disruptive technologies which can cause profound social impact and raise serious ethical issues, Peach will study the relationship between Presence technologies and society, looking at areas such as trends, ethics and legal aspects. Peach is also working to foster contact between researchers and the market, and enhance the public understanding of Presence research and technology.

10th International Bauhaus Colloquium — Weimar 2007

The Reality of the Imaginary — Architecture and the Digital Image — Bauhaus-Universität Weimar April 19 - 22, 2007

Call for papers for young scholars and PhD candidates.

The Bauhaus Colloquium is an international conference which has been held at regular intervals since 1976. It is devoted to the theoretical, philosophical and historical investigation of contemporary architecture.

On the basis of the current debates on the digital media technologies, augmented reality and ubiquitous design the 10th International Bauhaus Colloquium will discuss The Reality of the Imaginary - Architecture and the Digital Image. It can be hardly overlooked but the new reality of the digital habitat has been unsettling architecture for quite some time. Steadily and increasingly the new image technologies are shaping the world on their terms.

Since the early 1990’s architecture theory has been shifting its theoretical focus from the linguistic sign to the digital image. For a while it even looked as if spatial imagination might be eventually absorbed by digital media. Some people even believed in a late fulfilment of the post-modern postulate of the end of architecture. But today the digital image techniques can no longer be reduced to a matterless, ephemeral and solely imaginary world. On the contrary, with the growing liquidification of the boundaries between digital images and the world of material objects, digital images do not any longer present an autonomous sphere.

The new image techniques not only interpret the world anew but actively interfere with its material and spatial practices, i.e. with its architectural constitution. In the context of today’s digital turn it seems as if especially today the imaginary digital world and the architectural material world are growing more permeable to each other.

Therefore the colloquium proposes to discuss architecture as a cultural practice that is engaged in a permanent process of border crossing between image and space, between sign and material and between the reality of the architectural space and the imaginary world of the digital sphere.

With this call for papers we are asking young scholars and PhD candidates for their application. Four
workshops will be offered. The topics of the workshops are the same as in the four plenary sessions:

• Image and Space
• Architecture and the Production of Visibility
• Urbane Image - Global Media
• Forms of Mobilizing the Gaze

Please send an abstract of maximum 300 words and indicate the workshop you think appropriate to your
work. Please attach a brief CV.

The deadline is January 12, 2007. Mail to be sent to: bauhaus-kolloquium {at} uni-weimar dot de

EuropIA.11: 11th International Conference on Design Sciences & Technology
Digital Thinking in Architecture, Civil Engineering, Archaeology, Urban Planning and Design : Finding the Ways — September: 19-21, 2007 - Montreal - Quebec - Canada

New digital cultures bring inevitable changes to our world and to the techniques, research methods and practices of design. The computer technology transforms slowly but surely the professions of environmental planning, architecture, archaeology and design. In recent years, we witness the emergence of digital methods using computer not only for facilitating technical tasks, but also to analyse project’s performance or amplify the creative thinking of designers. Educating the future professionals has become a real challenge due to the clash between fast developing technology and slower evolving new design thinking and values redefinition.

Confronting multi-disciplinary theoretical, teaching and practice experiences at the Europia11, will help finding the ways to the future of design.

Topics:

• Digital Design Thinking
• Environmental Design: Changing Values
• Digital Methods in Archaeology and Heritage Reconstruction
• Design Process and Know-how Communication

And EuropIA relevant subjects:

• Archaeology and Reconstruction
• Building and Construction Robotics
• Collaborative Design
• Design Education
• Design Support Environments
• Design Knowledge Representations
• Design Methods Process and Creativity
• Digital Fabrication and Prototyping
• Ecological and Sustainable Design
• Heritage Conservation and Reconstruction
• Human and Machine Intelligence
• Intelligent Design and Planning Tools
• Intelligent, Interactive and Responsive Environments
• Knowledge Based Design and Generative Systems
• Urban Design
• Virtual and Augmented Reality

Important Dates:

• December 1, 2006: Call for papers - Open
• March 15, 2007: Submission Full paper deadline
• April 30, 2007: Notifications to Authors
• June 15, 2007: Final papers camera ready

Papers Submission
Papers should be maximum 12 pages in length (a full page of text is about 500 words), i.e. your contribution might be around 5000 words long (including references) plus figures. Papers must be submitted in a word format to the following address: eia11-submit {at} europia.org.

Reviewing

• All papers will be reviewed using a blind refereeing process by at least two members of the International Advisory Board.
• The proceedings of the conference will be published by Europia - Publishers, Paris, France
• Special issue of the Journal: IJDST (http://europia.org/DST)

Link: http://europia.org/EIA11