Call for papers
NSA Domesticity
First International Conference on User Centric Media - UCMedia 2009
9-11 December 2009 - Venice,Italy
It seems that one of the trends is going on-demand for the commodities. Cultural products can be enjoyed on demand in digital format. Although we do not ship our cars once we move from one country to another, we always can benefit from car on-demand services such as zipcar. Our personal photo albums and memories can be accessed on demand through on line services like blogs and photo sharing platforms like flickr. Socializing on demand can happen on on- line social networking platforms like Facebook. We get our coffee on-demand at Starbucks. We use restroom on-demand with public restrooms. Some of us enjoy occasional sex on-demand. We have food on-demand using food delivery services. And the list goes on...
Manifestations of this on-the-Run, on-Demand culture falls under two major categories, the commodities that has been digitized and can be accessed via a connection to the global network , and commodities that are still physical but getting on-demand access to them can be facilitated or in some cases made possible via some level of technological mediation.
The subject of this workshop fits into the category "User centric media services in the extended home", and the goal is to address questions which include
- What portion of our domestic spaces and activities can go on-demand without any string attached?
- Which part of this transformation from possession to on-Demand can be enhanced or mediated with digital technologies on-the-run or in short, what is possible with mobile phones and opportunities provided via this technological platform?
- How the concept of home can extend beyond a particular location using the technology in the palm of your hand?
- What aspects of domesticity can be delivered digitally and what aspects can be demanded or requested via digital mediation?
- Will a day come that the only thing we carry along with us on our never ending journey is our mobile phone?
- Will our phone be enough to feel at home?
- Can we live our lives in a distributed domestic space augmented with digital technology?
- Can we arrange our use of an on-demand kitchen via mobile voice, mobile instant message or mobile internet?
- Can we transform our immediate surroundings to a home theatre ordering a movie on mobile digital TV and viewing it on a publicly shared digital screen?
- What are the possible on-demand domesticity scenarios? What are the potentials? What is the limit? What are the constraints?
- How can we use our mobile phones as remote controls that allow us to interface with our tempo-spatial context- i.e. To activate digitally augmented urban furniture as in public digital displays, or to request and retrieve tempo-spatial real-time information about our urban context (festivities, services, events, traffic, public transport, etc.) Our environment will be more an extension of ourselves and our desires if we can control it from the palm of our hand. Who can we design for mobile platforms that facilitate such scenarios?
Structure of the workshop
The workshop has an hybrid format of invited speaker's presentations of high-level concepts and possible scenarios on one hand, and idea generation discussion sessions on the other hand. In addition to this section we extend the scope of possibilities through an open call for concept papers that focus on the core vision of the workshop. The deliverables of the workshop will be a combination of design briefs and storyboards of possible scenarios in this realm, developed in the course of idea generation session and a series of selected submissions received via the open call for papers.
Please read Information for Authors for details about the submission.