Friends,
The evolving threads about dissemination, aggregation, and
communication raise a few thoughts.
Dissemination requires something to say. That cuts out publishing for
administrative statistics.
Aggregating is a vital function and many media exist for this
purpose. The first university was actually a library -- the great
Museion and library of Alexandria supported 100 professors and their
research students. I sometimes think that a university is little more
than a cluster of scholars and students who meet around a stack of
books. Of course, that's not true in the professions, where we also
need studios or laboratories. But there is something to it -- and
they had different kinds of studios and laboratories in Alexandria as
well.
There is also the issue of communication and interaction, and this is
where online conferences can add something to the mix by enriching
opportunities of time scale and geographic scope -- at the same time
as reducing costs.
The field of design research is still giving birth to a literature.
While scholarly and scientific publishing go back to the original
Philosphical Transactions, our oldest journal was born roughly a
quarter century ago. Today, a growing group of journals includes
Design Studies, Design Issues, International Journal of Design,
Journal of Design Research, Design Journal, Artifact, Design Methods
and Theories, Design Science and Technology, Journal of Design
History, Journal of Design Management, Korean Journal of Design
Research, Scandinavian Journal of Design History, Journal of Design
Communication, and Art Design and Communication in Higher Education.
Despite this growth - and because of it - we are struggling to find
the shape and culture of our literature. Our task is difficult
because our scholars and writers come from all the established fields
of scholarship and science - humanities, history, social science,
natural science, technology, and engineering. We have different
intellectual traditions, different conceptual frames, and different
writing styles, not to mention methodological differences and
different citation styles.
The challenge of scholarly communication within and across the
boundaries of our many traditions is exacerbated by the fact that
design research includes a growing cohort of scholars who come from
arts and craft traditions. Until now, these traditions have
communicated knowledge through direct oral presentation aided by the
physical and behavioral modeling allied to tacit knowledge.
The last time that a scientific literature faced a similar challenge
must have been the end of the Renaissance when the poetic metaphors
of alchemy slowly gave to explicit chemical writing.
Edgar, Teena, Susan, and Chris, along with Jeremy and now Audrey put
forward several suggestions on distant conference contributions,
regional conferences, and different publishing approaches. These
deserve thought. So do the comments on carbon footprints. I want to
share some thoughts on the future of on-line conferences. This is
embedded in the details of working life, so I'm going to write a long
post.
Just yesterday, I was writing off-list to one participant in this
conversation to say that I'm likely to withdraw from a couple of
conferences that I had planned to participate in before moving to
Melbourne. I have the budget and the conferences are worthy, but I am
not comfortable with the total combination of budget cost, time,
jet-lag and carbon cost for a single good conference. I'll travel to
Europe in July for three conferences and some meetings. At that rate,
the total becomes worth while. Unless I can make things fit together,
I feel the need to be far more frugal than when I could hop across
the North Sea.
Nevertheless, it is important for my faculty to send early career
researchers and doctoral students to conferences in Europe and North
America. That's expensive, but finding or raising that money as
important. One of the issues I am pursuing is seeing how we can make
better use of such journeys than simply attending a conference and
coming home. Understanding the true cost of long-distance travel
returns us to the time when people would not have taken a four-week
ocean trip just for a conference. When they _did_ attend a
conference, it was an opportunity to confer, not simply a chance to
present and hear papers.
All the suggestions here offer ways forward. My own future plans are,
for the most part, to attend or sponsor small, focused conferences.
When we bring people together face to face, we plan on small,
meetings that offer a genuine opportunity to work together for at
least four or five days with plenty of advance work to make the most
of our time together. That also makes for a better conference.
This is in essence the model that David Durling and I pursued at La
Clusaz. An outright grant from the Norwegian School of Management and
a loan from the Design Research Society enabled us to keep the
conference cost low. We arranged a great bargain at a five-star
resort hotel using off-season empty time with people paying direct
for accommodations. We provided ten scholarships for doctoral student
participants who helped us to run the thing as well as attending.
In the run-up to the face-to-face conference, Chris and I whipped up
an informal and highly successful on-line debate. At one point, I
wrote something on whether Picasso could have earned a Ph.D. Chris
grabbed that idea and channeled the spirit of Zeke Conran to put
forward some stimulating ideas. I responded by nailing some theses on
doctoral education to the digital doors of the old DRS list. I
challenged people to a debate and we were off. The debate lasted from
April 2000 through the end of June 2000, just before the conference.
In 2003, PhD-Design hosted a more formal on-line conference on Design
in the University. We started by looking at plans for a new design
school at University of California Irvine, and the conference ran
with formal contributions, responses, and debate from 14 November to
18 December.
In 2006, Chris and the Sheffield group took on-line conferences to
the next level with a conference connected to their UK Arts and
Humanities Research Council project reviewing practice-led research.
This took place on a dedicated JISCMAIL list, it last three weeks
with weekends off. The format was carefully defined with requests for
word limits and cogent summaries.
Just last month, Oguzhan Ozcan and the Leonardo journal group hosted
a highly successful on-line conference on PhDs in art on Leonardo's
Yasmin list.
Given today's technology, true on-line conferences are around the
corner. The factors that require this include our increasing
awareness of true costs -- including environmental degradation. The
factors that enable it are comprehensive global access via the web, a
stable record via list archives, the added benefit of working slowly
in both real time and asynchronous time to allow conversation to
mature. Only a few factors are required to transform the current
tradition of successful informal on-line conferences to full formal
on-line conferences that constitute publishing.
Audrey's CFP is another kind of partial step. GLIDE '08 is an
international version of the single-university seminar-style
conference where the hosts make all choices and decisions.
What I think comes nest is a true conference with a full conference
committee and peer review that involves a formal announcement and
call for papers using the full resources of the extended field, just
as a face to face conference might do. The CFP would go out well in
advance, allowing ample time for participants to write a proper paper
or a short paper with references, followed by a robust peer review
process.
With the shift to a different kind of conference, it once again
becomes appropriate to write either a full paper or a shortened paper
with references. As I see it, reviewing from abstracts is one reason
for the problems we see in many conferences. Others may disagree -- I
see advantages to reviewing from abstracts in some cases, but the
field would be better for a richer mix.
Eitherway, this requires time. A single-university selection group
may call for abstracts on a one-week notice. GLIDE '08 has an April
15 deadline for abstracts with a June 1 deadline for paper drafts, so
they fit somewhere between. A true conference needs more time.
To justify the required time, organizers must treat conferences in a
way that permits national systems to award proper metric credit for
conference contributions. This means publishing a full, formal
proceedings with an ISBN. This can now be done as a PDF for download.
A thoughtful conference web site can also offer a PDF version of each
paper for easy individual reading.
The actual conference can easily take place on such systems as the
JISCMAIL system or a Wikispace system with the publication or
"reading" of the paper on the site and the ensuing conversation
archived in public. After the conference, participants would have the
opportunity to revise papers for final publication in the proceedings.
On-line conferences offer an important intermediate stage between
small conferences where people really work together and large
international face to face events. Because they can convene at any
time from anywhere, they can afford to focus on tight themes to
develop robust engagement. To be exciting, they must involve enough
paper presenters to allow a wide range. To be manageable, they must
have few enough to allow people to focus with a good day of
conversation around each formal paper.
We've learned about formalization and the time dimension over the
past few years. The introduction of speakers with a day for each
conversation after the presentation works well. This is what we did
with Design in the University. Setting reasonably formal standards
for contribution with light moderation is important. This is what we
did for the AHRC Practice-Led Review, and it worked better still.
Four weeks seems to be too long for a successful conference -- energy
runs low. Two weeks seems to be too short a time to generate
momentum. This sets a rough limit of 15 to 20 papers.
It is important to note that there is no need for parallel sessions
in this format. Instead, over the course of a year or so, the entire
field can convene to examine crucial issues.
Several colleagues and I have been working on plans for such a
conference. Part of my interest at this time involves testing the
medium, both the generate the content of the conference and to
develop a proof-of-concept approach to format ideas and innovations,
as well as to see what we can adapt from earlier on-line conferences
and from live events.
That where it stands now. I'd be curious to hear what others have to
say about the ways that we can augment earlier meeting formats to
allow for future needs in ways that increase sustainable conference
practice while reducing costs and enhancing access.
Best regards,
Ken
--
Ken Friedman
Professor
Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
+61 3 92.14.68.69 Tlf Swinburne
+61 404 830 462 Mobile
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