Temporalities of Engagement: challenges of co-design in public spaces

Guest Editors

Important dates

• Deadline: May 20, 2017 -> June 10, 2017 (extended)

• Notification to the authors: June 30, 2017

• Camera ready paper: July 30, 2017

• Publication of the special issue: end of September, 2017

Overview

New technologies are providing the needed infrastructure for increased collaboration and co-creation in public spaces. It is no longer novel to engage citizens in urban planning sessions using diverse shared spaces and augmented reality applications, to have audiences create content in museums, to see libraries offering maker spaces, to allow audiences to co-create storylines in theaters. However, research on such public co-design still needs to catch up with emerging practices and address, at various levels of granularity, reflections on what type of activities are proposed and for what purpose, how are the co-design explorations carried out, where are they carried out and who to include in ways that are relevant for both participants as well as researchers.

For this focus section, we are particularly interested in exploring temporalities of engagement and their relation to outcomes, where outcomes are seen as either co-created artifacts or a new knowledge gained in relation to the time investment. Pop-up and Drop-in spaces are becoming common and may happen in a variety of formats that engage people over a short period. For example, Pop-up graphite art, cafés, or parking lot gardens may engage for as little as a few minutes, usually random by passers. Drop-in civic events, games, museum or theater co-creative events also engage over a short time, but frequently, already interested and motivated audiences. Intermediate and long-term engagements, e.g., participatory design (PD), can also happen in diverse formats and under different agreements with participants, with work taking place in libraries, museums, parks and other places suitable for longer-term engagements. 

Topics of Interest

We are particularly focusing on methods and evaluation of civic and cultural engagement activities. We welcome all papers that help identify good research methods and methodologies, as well as best practices regarding temporal and spatial configurations in co-creative projects within public cultural and civic sphere.

Topics may include:

• Explorations of relation between the length of engagement and the expected outcomes

• Public spaces and their relation to temporalities of engagement

• Understanding of ‘participatory culture’ when public spaces for participation and engagement in cultural sphere varies in time

• Temporality and methods chosen for engagement

• Engagement with current “hot issues” and creation of a “critical mass” necessary to set changes in motion

Submission procedure 

All submissions (abstracts and later final manuscripts) must be original and may not be under review by another publication.

The manuscripts should be submitted anonymized either in .doc or in .rtf format. 
All papers will be blindly peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers. Perspective participants are invited to submit a 8-20 pages paper (including authors' information, abstract, all tables, figures, references, etc.). 
The paper should be written according to the IxD&A authors' guidelines .

Submission page -> link
(when submitting the paper please choose Domain Subjects under: 'IxD&A special issue on: 'Temporalities of Engagement: challenges of co-design in public spaces’')

For scientific advices and for any query please contact the guest-editor:

• almira [at] ifi [dot] uio [dot] no

• dagnystuedahl [at] hioa [dot] no

marking the subject as: 'IxD&A special issue on: Temporalities of Engagement'.