5th International Mobile Music Workshop 2008
13-15 May 2008, Vienna, Austria

Call for Submissions: Deadline 10 February 2008
Visit the 2007 website here: http://www.mobilemusicworkshop.org/07/index.html

The Mobile Music Workshop 2008 is the 5th in a series of annual international gatherings that explore the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. They are inspired by the ever-changing social, geographic, ecological, emotional context of using mobile technology for creative ends. We are looking for new ideas and ground-breaking projects on sound in mobile contexts. What new forms of interaction with music and audio lie ahead as locative media, ubiquitous networks, and music access merge into new forms of experiences that shape the everyday? Can they change the way we think about our mobile devices and about walking through the city?

The emerging field of Mobile Music sits at the intersection of ubiquitous computing, portable audio technology and New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). It goes beyond today’s personal music players to include creative practices of mobile music making, sharing and mixing. The mobile setting challenges existing notions of interfaces and interaction, stretching music to new creative limits. The workshop has been at the forefront of this innovative area since 2004. Past editions of the event have taken place in Amsterdam, Brighton, Vancouver and Göteborg in collaboration with the Viktoria Institute, STEIM, Waag Society, Futuresonic, NIME and others.

The 2008 edition of the workshop will be held in Vienna, one of the hotspots in the European for laptop, glitch, and electronic music. Hosted by the University of Applied Arts, it will feature three evenings of performances and installations, an exhibition in the heart of the city, invited speakers, paper presentations, posters and demo sessions as well as hands-on tutorials. Besides the workshop proceedings, we will publish a catalogue that will gather key contributions from the last 5 years. We invite artists, designers, academic researchers, hackers, industry professionals and practitioners from all areas, including music, technology development, new media, sound-art, music distribution, cultural/media studies and locative media and more to present and discuss projects, prototypes, applications, devices, performances, installations, theoretical and historical considerations.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES
Submission deadline: 10 February 2008
Notification of acceptance: 14 March 2008
Submission deadline for final papers: 14 April 2008
Registration deadline: 14 April 2008

PARTICIPATE
Please upload your submission in any of the three following categories at http://ocs.waag.org/. Submissions will be peer-reviewed by a committee of international specialists in the field.

ORGANISERS & INFORMATION
The 2008 edition is hosted and co-organised by the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria (Nicolaj Kirisits). The Steering Committee is formed by Lalya Gaye (Dånk! Collective and IT-University of Göteborg, Sweden), Atau Tanaka (Culture Lab Newcastle, UK), Frauke Behrendt (University of Sussex, UK), Kristina Andersen (STEIM, The Netherlands).
Contact: info [at] mobilemusicworkshop.org
More information: http://www.mobilemusicworkshop.org

Futuresonic brings 500 opinion formers, futurologists, artists, technologists and scientists from the digital culture, music and art communities to Manchester for four days of seminars, workshops and events.

At the heart of the Futuresonic festival is the internationally-acclaimed Futuresonic conference, and its focal point the Social Technologies Summit, which looks at how technologies can create an extension of social space or support group interaction, and asks how we can make technology more social.

Submissions are now invited to the Futuresonic conference and the Social Technologies Summit. Proposals for talks, presentations and workshops plus also session themes are invited. Submissions of innovative formats for social interaction are encouraged.

Online, Mobile and Unplugged Social Networking

The Futuresonic conference is a place where important international discussions take place. The conference will bring together leading figures to unpick the hype around the latest technological zeitgeist, broaden the debate, and propose and explore a critical understanding of social technologies.

The 2008 conference will explore the theme of The Social - Online, Mobile and Unplugged Social Networking. Submissions are invited that explore the new social spaces and the social implications of technologies for the many different kinds of people who make, use and are affected by them.

Computers have become social interfaces for sharing digital media and collaborating to build online communities and folksonomies. Social technologies create an extension of social space, and new ways for people to find the stuff that interests them, link up with others, and share. They include tools and applications that enable people to connect, share and interact, such as blogs, instant messenger, social software such as Flickr, FaceBook and Jaiku, and even the internet itself. ‘Social technologies’ can also refer to technologies created and maintained by social networks, such as communities of developers and users working collaboratively with open source tools.

What distinguishes social technologies is that they are bottom up and many-to-many instead of one-to-one or one-to-many. They can be seen as a part of a major cultural and social shift. And yet at the same time we also see how electronic communication can isolate us, as more and more people drown in a deluge of email that generates stress, even reducing IQ - puncturing the rose-tinted view that life is ‘more social.’ Additionally, ‘online communities’ are based upon an artificial equivalence between ‘users’ which obscures power relationships and issues of ownership.

Deadline: 5pm, Tuesday 18 December 2007.

http://www.futuresonic.com/

Keho, the ezine of the Peach project is now online and ready to download here: http://www.starlab.info/peach/?q=node/6

Keho is an online magazine for Peach, the project aimed at supporting the Presence research community.

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.

Contact us at keho [at] peachbit.org or have a look at the Peach website: www.peachbit.org, where you can participate in forum discussions, under the OUTREACH heading. Perhaps you have an idea for a theme for a future issue of Keho.

If you would like to be notified when the next issue of Keho is available please subscribe to the mailing list at keho [at] peachbit.org

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.

“SPACE = INTERACTION = DISCOURSE”
International conference

Plenary speakers:
* John A. Dixon, Lancaster University, UK
* Ole B. Jensen, Aalborg University, Denmark
* Elizabeth Keating, University of Texas at Austin, USA
* Lorenza Mondada, Université Lumière Lyon2, France
* Ron Scollon, Alaska, USA

Dates: 12th - 14th November 2008
Location: Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
Web site: http://www.placeme.hum.aau.dk/conf2008/

The aim of this international conference entitled “Space = Interaction = Discourse” is to bring together researchers who investigate space, mediated discourse and embodied interaction from different perspectives. The conference will highlight interdisciplinary research that explores how embodied and virtual social actors communicate, interact and coordinate their activities in complex multimodal environments, with a special focus on place, mobility and the body. Thus, this conference welcomes contributions by scholars and doctoral students in a range of disciplines and fields of inquiry, including discourse studies, conversation analysis, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, interaction analysis, architecture, design, geography, sociology, anthropology, environmental psychology, mobility studies, ubiquitous computing, computer-supported cooperative work and computer-supported cooperative learning. Please see the online call for papers for more details.

The conference will take place at Aalborg University, and it will consist of invited keynote lectures, parallel paper sessions and a workshop. The topics of the keynote lectures and workshop will be announced later.

Submissions are solicited for paper presentations (30 minutes including question time). Please submit an abstract and register on the website. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st February 2008. All submissions will be reviewed by the scientific committee. Notification of acceptance by 1st March 2008.

The registration fee is 1500 DKK (approx. 200 euro), which includes participation in the conference, a conference folder, the reception, three lunches and two coffee/tea breaks each day over the three days.

The conference is international and open to researchers, doctoral and graduate students.

If you would like to take part in this exciting conference, then please visit our website for further details: http://www.placeme.hum.aau.dk/conf2008/

For more information, contact the organiser: Paul McIlvenny: sid2008 (at) hum.aau.dk.

This conference is supported by the “PlaceME” Nordic research network (funded by NordForsk) and the Department of Language & Culture, Aalborg University.

The 10th anniversary conference on Participatory Design: Experiences and Challenges
September 30 - October 4, 2008
Bloomington, Indiana, USA
Sponsors: CPSR and ACM
http://www.pdc2008.org

Please visit the web-site to see the different contributions that we call for.

Submission deadline (all contribution types): March 15, 2008

Participatory Design (PD) is a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, tools, environments, businesses, and social institutions more responsive to human needs. A central tenet of PD is the direct involvement of people in the co-design of things and technologies they use. Participatory Design Conferences have been held every two years since 1990 and have formed an important venue for international discussion of the collaborative, social, and political dimensions of technology innovation and use.

The conference theme for PDC 2008 is Experiences and Challenges. It will be the 10th PDC and a golden opportunity to reassess the achievements of the PD movement and to consider its future. We invite you to reflect on past experiences and review the important lessons we have learned so as to better meet the new challenges of the future. What are the important trends, phenomena, developments, and views on participation and design etc., which in so many different ways challenge our traditions, our experiences and/or the current ‘wisdom’ within the field?

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