Internal news
Maria Basile, having been working in IPCity at Université Marne la Vallée, Champs sur Marne, is joining a new post in an other university. She will still be with us for the September Workshop in Paris. Burcu Ozdirlik, a gracious and skilled doctorant of our lab, coming from Turkey, is joining the team. She will also be present in September workshop.

TimeWarp poster accepted to SIGGRAPH2007
A poster titled “TimeWarp: An Explorative Outdoor Mixed Reality Game” by Iris Herbst, Sabiha Ghellah and Anne-Kathrin Braun has been accepted as a poster to the SIGGRAPH 2007.

SIGGRAPH 2007 posters: http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/attendees/posters/all.html
SIGGRAPH 2007: http://www.siggraph.org/s2007

Accepted paper
A paper by Giulio Jacucci and Ina Wagner titled “Performative Roles of Materiality for Collective Creativity” has been accepted for the special issue of the Leonardo Journal.

Accepted short paper
A paper titled “Urban Sketcher: Mixed Reality on Site for Urban Planning and Architecture” by M. Sareika and D. Schmalstieg has been accepted as a short paper to ISMAR 2007.

See http://www.ismar07.org

10-11 January 2008: Design Research Week Call for Papers and Projects

Conference to be held at the Interdisciplinary Design Institute of Washington State University Spokane. Topic: Design + Politics

From obtaining a building permit to raising environmental awareness in design, from “sick building syndrome” to designing for security, from off-grid housing to New Urbanist town planning, the design of built environments is intimately related to politics. The Interdisciplinary Design Institute holds its Fourth Annual Design Research Conference January 10-11, 2008, in Spokane, Washington, to discuss this relationship. This is an interactive conference in which invited speakers, paper presenters and students from a wide range of disciplines participate in multiple venues for the exchange ideas during the conference.

Submissions for papers and projects can address the following areas of concern (other related topics will of course be considered as well):

• The politics of implementing design
• The affect of gentrification on disadvantaged urban populations
• Funding diverse housing types to balance high-end condo boom
• Implications of design standards and policy on businesses and private property ownership
• Implementing service design into education: Habitat for Humanity, student involvement in medical, faith-based, criminal
  justice, etc, domains
• The politics of defensible space: how secure can you make things before you separate people from others?
• Implementing history: returning to historical “stage sets” to promote “new urbanism”
• How the built environment affects group behavior: prisons, hospitals, schools, corporate headquarters
• How do practitioners inform policies promoting “best practices?”
• Incorporating students “real-time” in policymaking and design decisions
• Updating planning and building codes to meet the cybernetic revolution
• Is ADA enough? Cultural sensitivities in relation to accessibility
• Can design be embedded in medical insurance policies?
• Gender, design, and politics

Presenters’ work actually presented at the conference will be further peer reviewed for inclusion in the Interdisciplinary Design and Research e-Publication (IDRP), sponsored by the WSU Interdisciplinary Design Institute: http://www.idrp.wsu.edu/.

Papers are to be a maximum of 5,000 words. Initial submission shall be an abstract not to exceed one page. For ease of distribution for blind peer review, be sure the document is in MS WORD (not pdf).

Projects can be designs (or concepts) of a built form of any scale, so long as an accompanying narrative explains how the project addresses the conference topic. Initial submission shall be a one page document providing an image of the project with a narrative explanation of sufficient length to fit on the same page.

All submissions must include contributor(s) name, affiliation, and contact information. Submission shall be by email only to davewang - at - wsu.edu. All submissions will be blind peer reviewed. DEADLINE for initial submissions: September 12, 2007, with decisions issued at the end of October.

Call for Papers, Architectural Concepts and Media Art Projects
MEDIACITY - Situations, Practices and Encounters
Conference of the MEDIACITY project
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
18-19th January 2008

The conference will investigate how the social settings and spaces of the city are created, experienced and practiced through the use and presence of new media. We will take the position that new media enables different settings, practices and behaviours to occur in urban space. These media create opportunities for diverse forms of connections between people and spaces and enable and create flows; of information, of communication and of knowledge.

The conference will consist of three parallel sessions and a workshop, which will explore these themes in a focussed way. We invite papers for the conference and less formal presentations on practices for the workshop session from academics, practitioners, activists close to disciplines such as media studies, architecture, urban studies, cultural and urban geography and sociology – using in innovative ways and reflecting critically on processes, methods and impacts of public participation and technologies in urban realm, within their theoretical and practical research, teaching, or activism roles.

Submission
Please submit a paper of between 2 and 4 pages as an extended abstract. The conference language will be English. Papers will be submitted to external review.

Outcomes
Selected papers from the conference will be published in a post-conference volume.

Important Dates
1st October 2007: Extended Abstracts dues
1st November 2007: Acceptance notification
18-19th January 2008: Conference

Contact and submissions: info(at)mediacityproject.com
Website: www.mediacityproject.com

Organizers
Prof. Frank Eckardt, Chair of Sociology of Globalization, Faculty of Architecture
Prof. Jens Geelhaar, Chair of Interface Design, Faculty of Media
Katharine S. Willis, Research Fellow
Laura Colini, Research Fellow
Konstantinos Chorianopoulos, Research Fellow
Ralf Hennig, Researcher, Co-ordination

The IPCity proposal to organise a workshop during CHI 2008 in Florence, Italy has been accepted. The one day workshop will be held on the 6th of April and in addition to IPCity members two outside experts have also been invited onto the programme committee. For more information see the IPCity website.

CHI2008: http://www.chi2008.org
MR workshop: http://www.ipcity.eu/workshop
CHI workshop page http://www.chi2008.org/workshopParticipants.html
CHI format page http://www.chi2008.org/formatting.html

The Street Beat music tour of Berlin is currently being tested. The system takes people on a tour of the underground culture of Berlin. The tests are ongoing and so far around eight people have taken part, more are expected over the coming weeks.

The first usability and presence tests for Timewarp took place in Cologne during August. Around eight people took part and they had a chance to meet the Heinzelmenchen of Cologne, some members of the public also expressed an interest with a group of children shouting “Cyborg” at one study participant. Further tests are planned.

Continuing with the mobile spatial theme, PerGames 2007 was held in Salzburg, Austria and ran in parallel with the ACM Computer Entertainment Conference. Sponsorship was provided by the EU Funded IPerG project which meant that the conference had more tracks than before and included a set of tutorials on specific aspects of pervasive games. These ranged from one covering patterns in pervasive game play through to how to commercialise the results. Some of the papers may also appear in the Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting and the ACM CE magazine. One of the amusing demonstrations was Salzburg Cityball – which is basically baseball played over an entire city using GPS enabled phones. For more information on PerGames visit: www.pergames.de

Rod McCall, Fraunhofer FIT

One of the major themes at this years CHI was mobile technologies, from mobile phones through to some more advanced concepts and devices. There were a number of sessions, with the mobile spatial interaction workshop providing a nice start to the conference. The workshop covered a whole range of topics such as: pointing and gesturing interfaces, geospatial modelling, context-aware systems, pervasive games and mobile augmented reality systems - which in turn brought people together from a range of fields including engineering, design, usability and GIS. For a copy of the workshop proceedings visit: msi.ftw.at

Rod McCall, Fraunhofer FIT

Antti Juustila (working with the IPCity at the University of Oulu Finland) participated the Imaging the City workshop, a part of the CHI 2007 conference. The one day workshop focused on the city as a special place for human-computer interation research and practice. The workshop explored the practices and technologies of imaging the urban environment, bringing together designers, HCI experts, urban planners and technologists.

The issues handled at the workshop ranged from how do we represent the city in HCI, what kind of technological devices, services and platforms support imaging the city now and in the future, and how these representations can be used for social and political ends. Also new methods for developing the technologies were discussed, along with the issues of what ca we learn from urban experience to design stronger representations and interfaces within HCI research and practice.

The workshop papers are listed in this website: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/cdisalvo/chi2007workshop/papers.html, including our paper on the experiment using surveillance cameras to enhance the experience of the architectural design site in the design studio, conducted as part of the Studio’n'Site and IPCity research projects at our department. The papers addressed the workshop topic in a very wide scale, ranging from mobile tools which “seeks to articulate the performative relations between places and identities”, evaluating the popularity of an area by statistical analysis of online map usage to “method for mapping the inter-relationship of space, social and informational networks that increasingly co-exist in our cities”.

The actual workshop did not include presentations of the papes, but instead group work and common sessions, drawing together the topics handled in the group assignments and discussing the outcomes of the group work.

At the end of the workshop we discussed interesting future research topics on the imaging the city. We identified the following topics for research:

• time, scales of time, representing temporality, also using sound, not only visual media
• using comics in imaging time
• film was not discussed in the workshop (only pictures), which was a bit of a surprise, considering that film is an important media for (at least some) architects
• The importance of situatedness: light/day; sun/rain/fog,…
• private spaces and interiors in imaging the city?
• soundscapes, including sound in representation
• construction of interpretations of the site; how would the space address us; talk to us with signs, symbols, audio,…
• cycles of renewal, evolution of cities, degeneration of cities
• many times a missing element in current research: people and conflict (not necessary violent) — how to design, not hide/ignore conflicts & conflicting views and debate (e.g. park renewal and homeless people)
• embeddedness of research: go in and engage, not just shortly but long term engagement

In summary, the workshop was very interesting also from the viewpoint of the IPCity, us focusing on some of the issues mentioned above.