[Ci4cg-announce] Fwd: [PDworld] CfP: Avoiding Ecocidal Smart Cities: Participatory Design for More-than-Human Futures – PDC 2018 workshop

Tue May 1 08:10:55 PDT 2018

this looks very relevant!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Marcus Foth <m.foth at qut.edu.au>
Date: Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 6:52 PM
Subject: [PDworld] CfP: Avoiding Ecocidal Smart Cities: Participatory
Design for More-than-Human Futures – PDC 2018 workshop
To: "pdworld at listserv.uni-siegen.de" <pdworld at listserv.uni-siegen.de>
Cc: Dr Sara Heitlinger <sara.heitlinger at newcastle.ac.uk>

Call for Participation

Avoiding Ecocidal Smart Cities: Participatory Design for More-than-Human
Futures

A workshop at the Participatory Design Conference – PDC 2018
20-24 August 2018, Hasselt & Genk, Belgium

http://pd4more.urbaninformatics.net

Submissions open until 14 May 2018 (extended from 02 May!)

Many early adopters of sustainable smart city technology employed a
technocratic approach. The dominant visions of these future cities, such as
in the “eco smart city” [19], address environmental sustainability through
the optimisation and rationalisation of urban processes, making them more
efficient and therefore more sustainable. However, critics claim that such
approaches are too simplistic, are unable to deal with the complexities of
real, messy cities [19] and perform sustainability in specific ways that
leave little room for participation and citizen agency [7,11,19].
Furthermore, the technocratic approach limited the actual social benefit
people could expect from their urban habitat, and this has led to a
participatory turn in smart cities [e.g. [1,12]. For example, many local
governments have started using human-centred and participatory design for
the integration of technology in urban environments to address issues of
sustainability.

However, the turn to participation within smart cities fails to address a
human-exceptionalist notion of cities, in which urban space is designed
for, and inhabited by, humans only. Within the age of the Anthropocene – a
term used to refer to a new geological era in which human activity is
transforming earth systems [16], accelerating climate change and causing
mass extinctions [18] – a human-centred perspective is increasingly seen as
untenable. In fields such as STS [10,13], environmental humanities [15,17],
geography [2,21], planning [16], design [5,8,25] and HCI [24], scholars are
expanding and challenging traditional binaries of Western thought such as
City/Nature, Human/Non-human, to consider the entanglements between human
and nonhuman worlds including in urban contexts, and the ways in which we
can conduct participatory research in morethan- human worlds, in order to
overcome problematic narratives of human privilege and exceptionalism.

The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to move the field of
participatory design for sustainable smart cities forward by bringing
together designers, practitioners, and researchers to explore what it means
to co-design genuinely sustainable cities that take into account the ways
in which cities and nature, and humans and non-humans are interrelated and
interdependent, for the co-creation of environmentally and socially just
postanthropocentric cities. We aim to develop new conceptions that move
away from traditional binaries and open up new possibilities for thinking
about participatory design for urban environments in hybrid
digital-physical space. We also aim to explore practical ideas about how
more-than-human perspectives can shape actual participatory design
practices and policies related to cities. For example, we might explore
design responses to new legal rights of non-humans such as trees and rivers
[20] and how their participation is negotiated in urban processes in hybrid
digitalphysical space [4].

Workshop Topics of Interests
The topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to the
following:

..  Participatory design and use of smart cities, urban informatics and IoT
technologies that explore human/morethan- human relations;
..  Methodological approaches, including opportunities and challenges for
designing in more-than-human worlds;
..  Speculative designs, design fictions, and art projects;
..  Ethical and legal considerations, e.g. design responses to a new legal
status of nature;
..  Designs that decentre the human or privilege other species;
..  Cultural aspects of sustainable smart cities in this space;
..  Theoretical perspectives from the literature e.g. Anthropocene,
Capitalocene [18], Chthulucene [13], and;
..  “World-making”, what could a more-than-human city be?

Audience
We welcome researchers and practitioners working on design cases, prototype
development and artistic installations, as well as those working on
theoretical, critical, legal, or ethical perspectives, including those from
STS, environmental humanities, and other disciplines. We welcome
methodological contributions, such as object-oriented ontology [3],
non-human ethnographies [22], speculative design, and actor-network and
assemblage theories related to decentring the human in design.

Submission Instructions
Participants are asked to contribute to the workshop with a position paper
or research note, which introduces aspects of the participant’s prior
research, future plans, insights, or interests in the area, as well as a
short biography (200 words). The max. length of workshop position papers is
2,000 words. Please only submit DOC, DOCX, or PDF files ensuring the file
size is below 5MB. Please submit your paper by email to Marcus Foth at
m.foth [AT] qut.edu.au

Submission deadline: 14 May 2018

The submissions will be reviewed by the workshop organisers for relevance.
Our workshop venue capacity is 40. If participants exceed places, we will
choose a balance of different perspectives on the workshop topic.

Workshop Organisers
Sara Heitlinger, Newcastle University, UK
Marcus Foth, QUT Design Lab, Australia
Rachel Clarke, Northumbria University, UK
Carl DiSalvo, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Ann Light, University of Sussex, UK
Laura Forlano, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA

Full list of references available at:
http://pd4more.urbaninformatics.net/cfp/

--
Prof. Marcus Foth FACS

Professor of Urban Informatics
QUT Design Lab, Brisbane, Australia
m.foth at qut.edu.au – @sunday9pm – qut.design

Honorary Professor, School of Communication & Culture
Aarhus University, Denmark

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