CFP: Culture, Creativity, and Interaction Design

At BCS HCI2011, I am co-organizing a workshop, CCID2: The Second International Symposium on Culture, Creativity, and Interaction Design, along with Shaowen Bardzell, Ann Light, and Mark Blythe. The first one in 2006 was a phenomenal experience for me personally and it helped my career in profound ways. The presentations were provocative and illuminating, the spirit was fun and friendly, and it helped me build a professional network and led to my first HCI-related journal publication!

We hope to recreate that success this year, additionally placing a special emphasis on building infrastructure for HCI’s cultural agenda, which we believe now is more widely legitimized than it was in 2006, but remains somewhat ad hoc in terms of networks, conferences, tracks, and jobs. Here is a blurb from the abstract:

In the past decade, HCI’s cultural research agenda has stabilized as an important sub-domain of the field. Although cultural approaches to interaction take many forms, broadly speaking they share a number of common features. These include disciplinary inputs beyond the social sciences, including literary theory, critical theory, aesthetic philosophy, feminism, performance theory, film studies, hermeneutics, postmodernism, fine arts, queer theory, and post-colonialism. Where they turn to science, it is more often to sciences’ responsive to critical traditions, such as ethnography and sociology, rather than experimental psychology or computer science. Many cultural approaches are also non-reductive; instead of isolating and manipulating independent variables, for example, they are more likely to embrace holistic and interpretative accounts of interaction, with all the benefits and limitations that implies. The focus of inquiry also differs from many traditional psychological and social science accounts of interaction. Cultural HCI research is often more concerned with accounts of the interiority of human experience (i.e., felt life) as it unfolds within—-and is made possible by—-particular social and political situations, of which technology is a part.

Following on the success of 2006’s First International Symposium on Culture, Creativity and Interaction Design (CCID), CCID2 seek to strengthen the connections among the diverse disciplines contributing to culture, creativity, and interaction design research. It will explore critical and reflective approaches to the design and analysis of interactive technology. Additionally, it will also develop strategies to improve its professional network infrastructure and provide educational and professional opportunities for the next generation of design researchers.

The CFP is open, and I really encourage folks to come and participate!

Creativity and iSchools – iConference Roundtable

Next week I will be participating on a roundtable at the iConference, in Seattle, WA, along with fellow panelists Eric Cook (Michigan), Kurt Luther (Georgia Tech), and Dan Perkel (UC Berkeley). The roundtable is at 4:00 pm on Wednesday, February 9. Our main question is what the creativity agenda does, could, or should look like for iSchools. Below is the abstract from our proposal:

Broad shifts are taking place in the way we think about the relationships between ICTs, creativity, and creative expression. Access to low-cost, powerful computational tools of creation and dissemination has engendered new forms of aesthetics and expression, new opportunities for individuals, and new threats to traditional industries. In the iSchool academic community, there is a similar shift in research interests beyond a traditional focus on formal workplace settings and instrumental uses of information technology towards social, expressive, and generative concerns.

In this roundtable proposal, we invite conference participants to engage and discuss these trends, and reflect on what the creativity agenda should mean in the iSchool context.  The roundtable will consider the impact of this agenda along a variety of dimensions, including research, outreach, and curriculum design. We seek to highlight an emerging new direction of intellectual activity within the iSchools, as well as foster an ongoing conversation on how to address and seize the opportunities brought about by these shifts.

We’ve put some planning into this and we’re very excited about it. If you are at the iConference, we’d love to have you join us!

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