WELCOME
CALL FOR PROPOSALS (click here for Submissions)
2008 CONFERENCE THEME
The conference theme for this Participatory Design Conference, PDC 2008, is Experiences and Challenges. Join us to celebrate two decades of biennial PDCs. We invite you to reflect on past experiences and review the important lessons we have learned so as to better meet the new challenges of the future. What are the important trends, phenomena, developments, and views on participation and design etc., which in so many different ways challenge our traditions, our experiences and/or the current ‘wisdom’ within the field?
PD: HISTORY, PURPOSE & BACKGROUND
Participatory Design (PD) is a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, tools, environments, businesses, and social institutions more responsive to human needs. A central tenet of PD is the direct involvement of people in the co-design of things and technologies they use. Participatory Design Conferences have been held every two years since 1990 and have formed an important venue for international discussion of the collaborative, social, and political dimensions of technology innovation and use.
PDCs started as a dialogue about user involvement in IT systems development between, on the one hand, Scandinavian scholars and promoters and, on the other hand, European and Americans interested in how the Scandinavian experience could be adopted and extended. Since then, the conference agendas have broadened to address participatory approaches in a variety of other arenas, including communications, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), healthcare, new media, architecture, the arts, and others.
PDCs bring together a multidisciplinary and international group of software developers, researchers, social scientists, managers, designers, practitioners, users, cultural workers, activists and citizens who both advocate and adopt distinctively participatory approaches in the development of information and communication artifacts, systems, services and technology. A central concern has always been to understand how collaborative design processes can be driven by the participation of the people affected by the technology designed.
PD approaches have been used in traditional application domains (such as computer systems for business, CSCW, healthcare and government) and more recently in areas such as web-portal design, e-government services, community networks, enterprise resource planning, social administration and community development, university/community partnerships, tele-health, communities of practice and political deliberation/mobilization (e-democracy), digital arts and design, scholarship and teaching with mediated technologies (e-learning), the experience of a sense of place, PD in developing countries, cultural production and cultural institutions.
2008 CONFERENCE
PDC 2008 will be held at Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington, Indiana, USA, and hosted by the IU School of Informatics. It will be the 10th PDC and a golden opportunity to reassess the achievements of the PD movement and to consider its future. We hope to broaden further the focus of PD and to consider the relevance of its traditions and commitments to the new debates over design. As the home of the first US PhD in informatics, the School of Informatics is very pleased to be hosting PDC. The Bloomington campus of Indiana University provides an excellent occasion for the Participatory Design community to extend its dialogue with leading scholars in international and global education. The campus is the site of several of the leading Area Studies programs (e.g., African Studies, East Asian Studies) in the US, as well as the so-called ‘i-school’ movement in North America. The i- or "information" schools are higher education units, typically professional schools, which are developing program that goes beyond the traditional computer science curriculum, even beyond programs in Information Technology. Several of the more that 50 i-schools were previously Schools of Library Science that now call themselves Schools of Information, Information Studies, or Informatics.
CALL FOR PROPOSAL CONTRIBUTIONS
We encourage you to submit proposals reflecting on important trends, phenomena, developments, and views on participation and design. We have identified a variety of presentation formats to create an interesting and lively conference experience. Proposal formats include:
