The Infrastructures of Digital Design: Thinking/Building/Living
A graduate conference at the University of California, San Diego
Friday, January 31st - Sunday, February 2nd, 2003
Confirmed speakers/discussants include: Howard Becker --- Geof Bowker ---
Sharon Daniel --- Ed Hutchins --- Lev Manovich --- Kate Rich --- Leigh Star
Call for Papers and Projects:
Digital infrastructures are thought, built, and lived, and these processes
operate as frameworks that simultaneously enable and disable creative social
activity. In thinking infrastructures we operate through a field of
possibilities opened within contemporary social, political, cultural and
technical imaginations. In building infrastructures we bring these
imaginations face-to-face with the material and institutional conditions of
shaped environments. In living infrastructures we reproduce, reshape and
resist the designs of infrastructure builders. These 'moments' of digital
design, often held separate for analytic purposes, are in practice always
colliding: in thinking we build, in building we live and in living we must
rethink. We consume and are consumed by infrastructure.
Even as these technical and social infrastructures of digital design
pervade, they threaten to disappear into an opaque foreground, becoming the
unacknowledged tools of the everyday. But the everyday of one can be the
struggle of another. Infrastructures have typically been thought of as
'cold' phenomena, invoking images of wires and switches, devices and systems
devoid of social content. Infrastructures of Digital Design argues that
there is a great deal of aesthetic, political and cultural heat in
infrastructure. To conceive of thinking/building/living infrastructures is
a call to move beyond conventional understandings of design and focus
attention on the ways people work and play, create and critique within the
interstices of digital environments. It pulls back to the possibility of
design, brings us to actions in design, and pushes forward to the
consequences - intended and unintended - of design in use.
Infrastructures of Digital Design encourages submissions of papers, projects
and works from graduate students in the arts, humanities, social sciences,
and engineering. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
+ Negotiating Design: collaborative and grassroots design practices,
communities of practice, user appropriations and adaptations, design
failures and contextual barriers to technology adoption, unintended
consequences...
+ Design and Control: surveillance, privacy issues, intellectual
property and copyrights...
+ Forms and Functions: affordances and aesthetics, 'infrastructural
intelligence', contexts for learning, play, infrastructural flexibility,
mobility, time and space (in)dependence...
+ Scaling Up: development of large-scale digital infrastructures
(research/business/national/international...), policy and standards setting,
interdisciplinary collaboration and communication...
+ Cultural Frameworks of Design: infrastructures and identity,
ruptures and raptures in technology-mediated social environments and
communities, broader cultural contexts of digital design, old and new in
'digital' reshapings of the cultural imaginary...
+ Ethics in Digital Infrastructures: presuppositions built into
design, information and access equity, long-term consequences for
communities...
The conference organizing committee welcomes student submissions in a
variety of formats, including:
Papers - Papers from a variety of disciplinary and
cross-disciplinary backgrounds are welcomed, and will be grouped into panels
moderated by faculty and/or grad discussants. Groups of 2-3 students who
wish to present in the same panel should indicate this when submitting their
abstracts.
Presentations/Poster Sessions - Presentation of works-in-progress is
encouraged and may be organized in formal panels or in scheduled poster
sessions. Early and/or exploratory work that addresses the conference
themes is particularly encouraged.
Artwork - The curatorial committee is seeking works that explore,
challenge or subvert the themes of the conference. The Marcuse Gallery and
the Visual Arts Performance Space at UCSD are available for scheduled
presentations, performances, installations, and screenings. Please see the
website or contact the organizing committee for more information about
spaces and technical capabilities. Artworks of all kinds will be
considered, with particular emphasis upon work in digital and new media
formats. Submissions of artwork should include, along with the project
description, the following information:
* media clips: web links, images, video, audio,
sketches, or installation notes
* audio/visual and technical requirements (note what
you will provide and what you will require)
* the names and school affiliations of all artists,
performers or participants involved in the project
Abstracts and/or project descriptions of 300 words or less, along with any
relevant supporting materials, should be submitted by November 1, 2002 to
[log in to unmask], or by mail at:
Infrastructures of Digital Design
c/o Department of Communication,
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0503
For more information and updates, check out http://infrastructures.ucsd.edu.
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