International Journal of Design

CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline Extended to March 31

(All papers will be reviewed as they are submitted.)

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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: 31 March 2008
Notification of Acceptance: 31 May 2008
Final Version of Paper Due: 30 June 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]