CALL FOR PAPERS

A Special Issue on "Cultural Aspects of Interaction Design"

The notion of interaction design has become an indispensable aspect of
product design and development, especially for those products with embedded
information technologies. While traditional industrial design focuses on a
product's functionality and its physical features, interaction design
focuses on the interactive experience of users. Since products are becoming
more pervasively and more tightly interwoven with our daily activities,
design calls for a deeper understanding of the diverse perspectives of
product use.

Culture has been considered to play a critical role for users in their
understanding, acceptance, positioning, and use of an artifact. The quality
of an interactive experience is produced in a particular cultural context
and is determined or evaluated in that context. Yet, when it comes to
incorporating cultural factors effectively in design practice, knowledge is
insufficient at all levels -- conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and
practical. Cultural factors need to be integrated in the design process in
order to achieve the high quality of product interaction that enables our
experience with a product to be effective and enjoyable.

For this special issue of the International Journal of Design, we are
seeking papers that present breakthroughs in conceptual, theoretical,
methodological and practical research that enhance the formalization of
design knowledge with regard to the "cultural aspects of interaction
design." In particular, these contributions should focus on representing
cultural factors in describable, operable, and usable forms of design
knowledge with relevance to interaction design. The following topics are of
particular interest, covering fundamental and contemporary issues in this
domain:

- Conceptual framework of cultural factors in interaction design
- Acquisition and representation methods for cultural factors in design
- Formal models of cultural factors in interaction design
- Planning, design, and evaluation methods that involve cultural
perspectives
- Cultural aspects of interaction methods and languages
- Assessment of the cultural effects of new interactive products
- Cultural factors in Kansei/emotional/affective aspects of interaction
- Cultural contexts of interaction design for ambient intelligence
environments
- Cultural factors related to usability

Schedule:

Full Paper Due: 28 February 2008
Notification of Acceptance: 30 April 2008
Final Version of Paper Due: 31 May 2008
Special Issue Publication Date: 1 August 2008

Submission of Papers:

Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the guidelines found at
www.ijdesign.org/authorGuidelines. Submitted papers should not have been
previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication
elsewhere. A double-blind review process will be employed for this special
issue.

Manuscripts should be sent through the on-line system at
www.ijdesign.org/submissions.
Authors should choose "Special Issue on Cultural Aspects of Interaction
Design" as the Journal Section when submitting papers.

Special Issue Editors:

Keiichi Sato
Institute of Design
Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
Tel: 312-595-4912
E-mail: [log in to unmask]

Kuohsiang Chen
Department and Institute of Industrial Design
National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Tel: +886 6-2757575, ext. 54335
E-mail: [log in to unmask]