CFP: New Sociotechnical Insights in Interaction Design 09: bridging social requirements and design- Workshop at Interact 2009

NEW SOCIOTECHNICAL INSIGHTS IN INTERACTION DESIGN 2009
bridging social requirements and design
25th of August 2009, Uppsala , Sweden
http://Itcentre.tvu.ac.uk/~jabdelno/sociotechid09

Workshop at INTERACT 2009
12th IFIP TC13 Conference in Human-Computer Interaction
www.interact2009.org

About the Workshop

One of the biggest challenges for HCI and CSCW is addressing the ongoing
tensions created by the gap between social requirements and the
affordances of technical design (Ackerman, 2000). The translation of
social knowledge into design decisions is not a simple problem, but one
that requires a redefinition of disciplinary boundaries and the subject
and object of interaction design. Addressing this socio-technical gap
requires a fresh look at how diverse areas of the social sciences
explore and conceptualize the relation between people, society and
technology under the rubric of 'sociotechnical'. While organizational
studies of technology adoption have a well-defined conceptual framework
known as sociotechnical systems theory with established principles
(e.g.Mumford, 1993), the situation is not the same for interaction
design research. The latter includes examples that give diverse meanings
to the term 'sociotechnical' when involving social methods and theories
(e.g. Hansen, 2006, Sommerville and Dewsbury, 2007). While perspectives
like ethnography, ethnomethodology (Dourish and Button, 1998) and
activity theory (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006) have had a clear impact in
the design of interactive systems, the potential contribution of other
social science perspectives such as American pragmatism (e.g Barnes,
2002; Mørch, 2009) or the Sociology of Technology (e.g. Bijker, 1995,
Abdelnour-Nocera et al., 2007) have not become so clear and uniform
despite the increased development of the pervasive and social proxy -
mediating and mediated -- characters of interactive systems.


This workshop addresses Interact's conference theme by looking for
useful connections between social science research and interaction
design practice. The workshop will bring together good examples of
research in interaction design that refers to the term
'socio-technical'. It is hoped the workshop will identify opportunities
for a socio-technical knowledge/conceptual framework in interaction
design. This workshop is the second in a series of workshops that
started in London in 2008 as an event jointly organized by the
Interactions and Sociotechnical specialist groups of the British
Computer Society. The workshop led to some of its best papers being
developed into a special issue in the international journal of
sociotechnology and knowledge development (Abdelnour-Nocera et al.,
2009).


Topics

The workshop aims to continue enabling new translations from the social
sciences to interaction design. The topics include, but are not limited
to, the following areas:

overview of related work in HCI and CSCW;

critiques of earlier approaches to design;

related work on sociotechnical design (e.g. participatory design,
organizational informatics);

actionable recommendations and guidelines for the conception, design and
evaluation of interactive systems as 'social proxies';

improved methods for the gathering and elicitation of 'social
requirements'; identifying socially responsible policies for interaction
design;

interaction design for web technology and social networking (e.g. web
2.0);

appropriation of theories from the social sciences to inform interaction
design;

understanding participatory design as a sociotechnical endeavour in
software engineering (e.g. agile methods; end-user development).

Submissions

Position paper submissions of up to 3,000 words are invited reporting on
research or experiences on any of the above topics. All papers must be
written and presented in English and will be peer reviewed by at least 2
reviewers. Submissions will be done through
http://itcentre.tvu.ac.uk/journal . It is expected that the best papers
presented at the workshop will be developed into an edited book in the
workshop topic. Papers must be formatted according to the LNCS (Lecture
Notes in Computer Science) format. For your convenience, a template for
Microsoft Word is provided here for direct downloading:


http://www.interact2009.org/sites/default/files/SpringerLNCS-word%20form
at.zip

Key Dates

- 1st of May 2009: Submission of position papers
- 15th of May 2009 : Notification of acceptance
- 30th of June 2009: Final version of accepted papers due
- 25th of August 2009: Workshop

Co-chairs

José Abdelnour-Nocera

Centre for Internationalisation and Usability,

Thames Valley University, London, UK, W5 5RF

Jose.abdelnour-nocera (at) tvu.ac.uk


Anders I. Mørch

InterMedia, University of Oslo, Norway

anders.morch (at) intermedia.uio.no


Programme Committee

Sisse Finken, University of Oslo, Norway

Andy Gorman, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

Thomas Hermann, University of Bochum, Germany

Victor Kaptelinin, Umeå University, Sweden

Kenji Matsuura, University of Tokushima, Japan

Liza Potts, Old Dominion University, USA

Helen Sharp, Open University, UK


José Abdelnour Nocera, PhD
Senior Lecturer
Head of Centre for Internationalisation and Usability
School of Computing
Thames Valley University
St Mary's Road, Ealing - London W5 5RF
http://itcentre.tvu.ac.uk/~jabdelno/