Call for Papers: GROUP 2020 Design Fictions
GROUP 2020 is proud to continue building the tradition within the ACM community, inviting submissions to the Design Fiction track, which is dedicated to sharing academic work that extends beyond the traditional research paper. This track aims to make explicit what the futures towards which technology research and design are working. What values, assumptions, narratives, commitments, etc. tacitly drive technology research? How can envisioning fictional configurations of technology and humans help elucidate alternatives? Design Fictions (DF) provide an opportunity to explore these issues while working to concretize alternative paths towards a desirable technological future.
Experimenting with a new format, this year’s submissions to GROUP 2020 Design Fictions will follow a two-round review process. Accept/reject decisions would be made after a single round of review, with all accepted DF submissions presented at the conference. A subset would be invited for a second round of review for inclusion in PACM that will contain the papers from the main technical track. Our overall ambition is to broaden participation, both in terms of the people and the perspectives represented, by making the Design Fiction track meet the publication desiderata of diverse researchers and designers.
Submissions should be comprised of two portions: a fictional document related to some aspect of social technology, and an author statement about the document. For inspiration, please see the examples listed at the end of this call. The fictional document could be an extended abstract, a call for papers, an excerpt from API documentation, a book review, a study protocol for IRB review, a video advertisement, or any other relevant genre. The author statement (corresponding the more academic part of a submission) should connect that document to current events, describe the origin or genesis of the document, cite on-going research in the field, or otherwise extrapolate how the envisioned future might arise from our given present. This statement should make clear how the fictional document, beyond being an interesting piece of literature, offers a contribution to social computing.
Each submission will be reviewed based on a variety of criteria, including: Does it help think through the implications or ramifications of current sociotechnical developments? How novel, creative, or clever is the submission, both in its content and in its format? How well situated is it in the current discourse and conversations? To what extent does it provide a novel perspective and/or a future agenda? In short, how well does it facilitate conversations about the futures towards which we are working?
Examples
1: Barry Brown, Julian Bleecker, Marco D’Adamo, Pedro Ferreira, Joakim Formo, Mareike Glöss, Maria Holm, Kristina Höök, Eva-Carin Banka Johnson, Emil Kaburuan, Anna Karlsson, Elsa Vaara, Jarmo Laaksolahti, Airi Lampinen, Lucian Leahu, Vincent Lewandowski, Donald McMillan, Anders Mellbratt, Johanna Mercurio, Cristian Norlin, Nicolas Nova, Stefania Pizza, Asreen Rostami, M\a arten Sundquist, Konrad Tollmar, Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Jinyi Wang, Charles Windlin, and Mikael Ydholm. 2016. The IKEA Catalogue: Design Fiction in Academic and Industrial Collaborations. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP), 335–344. https://doi.org/10.1145/2957276.2957298
2: M. Six Silberman. 2016. Reading Elinor Ostrom In Silicon Valley: Exploring Institutional Diversity on the Internet. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP), 363–368. https://doi.org/10.1145/2957276.2957311
3: Eric P. S. Baumer, Timothy Berrill, Sarah C. Botwinick, Jonathan L. Gonzales, Kevin Ho, Allison Kundrik, Luke Kwon, Tim LaRowe, Chanh P. Nguyen, Fredy Ramirez, Peter Schaedler, William Ulrich, Amber Wallace, Yuchen Wan, and Benjamin Weinfeld. 2018. What Would You Do?: Design Fiction and Ethics. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP), 244–256. https://doi.org/10.1145/3148330.3149405
4: Ben Kirman, Conor Linehan, Shaun Lawson, and Dan O’Hara. 2013. CHI and the future robot enslavement of humankind: a retrospective. In Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA) (alt.chi), 2199–2208.
Design Fictions Submission Deadline: June 7, 2019, 11:59pm AKST
Design Fictions Decisions Announced: Coming soon
First Round Notifications: August 1, 2019, 11:59pm AKST
Resubmission for Papers Invited to PACM: August 30, 2019, 11:59pm AKST
Notifications for Resubmitted Papers: October 1, 2019, 11:59pm AKST