[AISWorld] Special Issue of Human-Computer Interaction on Understanding Design Thinking

Jack Carroll jcarroll at ist.psu.edu
Mon Sep 24 15:24:07 EDT 2012


Colleagues,
  Scott Klemmer and I would like to invite you to participate in a special issue of Human-Computer Interaction on Understanding Design Thinking. The timeline is below. This announcement includes some initial thoughts. Treat this description as an opening: what this issue becomes is really up to you. I encourage you to contact us with any questions or ideas. We see a lot of exciting activity around design right now, and hope to provide a forum for sharing it. Looking forward to hearing from you,
  +Scott Klemmer and John Carroll

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Human-Computer Interaction on Understanding Design Thinking
Special Issue Editors: Scott Klemmer (Stanford University), John Carroll (Pennsylvania State University)

In recent years, design has profoundly influenced our cultural and technological landscape. Its impact is felt in the artifacts we use everyday, providing information at our fingertips, computing devices we carry with us, and software that connects people around the globe. Many of these technologies are increasingly personal, social, and discretionary; and their design plays a significant role in people's decision about what artifacts and services they use and how they use them. Designers must combine technical capabilities, user experience, aesthetics, and statements about culture and values. Design and designers are playing larger leadership roles in many organizations, and many organizations believe good design offers an important competitive advantage. Inspired by high-profile design successes, student enrollment and academic publishing on interaction design is at an all-time high.

The purview of designers is evolving as computing devices are taking on new shapes and playing new roles. New forms and roles for interactive computing are emerging in both workplaces and personal lives. Interactions are increasingly embodied: devices on our person, leveraging sensing and physical interaction, and connecting us with others. Design practice is also changing through the increasing availability of data. Devices and services commonly track usage, providing designers with a previously unavailable window into human behavior. Designers increasingly deploying social media to ask questions, critique assumptions, and invite dialog.

These sea changes and the increased embrace of design have led to water-cooler discussion and academic investigation in HCI and other fields, including business, psychology, education, and computer science. Some of these conversations address enduring fundamental issues in design, like how designers create artifacts, what design seeks to accomplish, and how design teams and stakeholders collaborate. Others explore the designer’s role in social systems, both in-person and online. And others discuss how design is changing or could change in light of new technical capabilities, social contexts, and reconceptualizations of design's role. These changes also open new possibilities for tools exploring how designers can “sketch” embodied and social experiences and how the design studio may change in the age of the Internet and pervasive computing.

Given these trends, it is timely to revisit fundamental thinking about design. We therefore seek high quality, thoughtful, and original work for this Special Issue on Understanding Design Thinking. This special issue takes an ecumenical approach to understanding design practice. It seeks to leverage the groundswell of interest from diverse fields, encouraging discussions and theories that integrate ideas across multiple disciplines and literatures. We encourage submissions employing diverse approaches and methods, including controlled experiments, field studies, participant observation, case studies, and new tools that instantiate and investigate theories of design creativity. In this special issue, we hope that you will join us in exploring the knowledge and practices of interaction design; strategies for designing interactions (with artifacts and with people); and empirically investigating the relationships between variables that influence design processes and outcomes. We also want this special issue to gather information to provide valuable guidance for design practitioners. Currently, many espoused design practices are faith-based rather than research-based. A better understanding of sensitive and creative design practice -- in the form of  empirical investigations, theories, and design tools -- has a tremendous opportunity for impact on people, organizations, and society.  With your help, this special issue will gather and extend our knowledge of these important issues.

We encourage papers that represent a variety of disciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches. We aim to connect the different communities involved in the practice of design.

Examples of topics that fall into the scope of this special issue include:
● A deeper understanding of design thinking
● Field observations and case studies of design practices
● Controlled experiments unearthing the active ingredients of design
● Crowdsourcing for design experiments and as a design method
● The role of aesthetics in design practices
● Tools and models for creative design and decision making
● How can designers "sketch" embodied interactions and connected experiences?
● Collaboration in design -- collocated, distributed, and online
● Designing ecosystems and connected experiences
● Teaching and learning interaction design
● Cross-cultural issues in design interactions
● Critical assessments of  and new perspectives on design
● User innovation and participatory design
● Physical and digital spaces for design and design collaboration
● Redesign, remixing, and bricolage

Timeline
● Call for proposals:  September 15, 2012
● Proposals due (optional):  November 1, 2012
● Response to authors:  December 1, 2012
● Full papers due:  February 15, 2013
● Reviews to authors:  May 15, 2013
● Revised papers due:  July 15, 2013
● Reviews to authors:  October 1, 2013
● Final papers due:  December 1, 2013

Submission of proposals
To help authors find a good fit, we encourage proposals, but do not require them. Proposals should be about 1000 words and provide a clear indication of what the paper will be about. Proposals should be submitted by email to the special issue editors (designissue at cs.stanford.edu<mailto:designissue at cs.stanford.edu>). The proposals will be evaluated for relevance to the special issue themes and guidance will be given. Full paper submissions should be emailed to Patricia Sheehan (sheehan at parc.com<mailto:sheehan at parc.com>). Mention explicitly in the email that your submission is intended for this special issue. The full paper submissions will be peer reviewed to the usual standards of the HCI journal.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aisnet.org/pipermail/aisworld_lists.aisnet.org/attachments/20120924/a21f1b06/attachment.html>


More information about the AISWorld mailing list