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SIMTech '08 CALL

1½ day event in Cambridge (UK), 20-21 November 2008

SYNOPSIS AND BACKGROUND

"That's a funny kind of thing, in which each new object becomes the occasion for seeing again what we can see anywhere; seeing people's nastiness or goodness or all the rest, when they do this initially technical job of talking over the phone. The technical apparatus is, then, being made at home with the rest of our world. And it's a thing that's routinely being done, and it's the source for the failures of technocratic dreams that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed. Where what happens is that the object is made at home in the world that has whatever organization it already has."

Harvey Sacks, 1992:548-9

This workshop is supported by Mark Rouncefield's European Microsoft Research Fellowship "Social Interaction and Mundane Technologies" and follows a similar, successful event held at the University of Melbourne in November 2007. Last year’s event attracted 3 keynote presentations, 17 full and short papers, and 6 posters. Forty-eight people from Australia, the UK, Asia and the US and Europe participated. Details of this event and the papers are available at:

http://www.mundanetechnologies.com/goings-on/workshop/melbourne/.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Please refer to the 'People' page.

THEMES & INTERESTS

The workshop this year is continuing to respond to the proliferation and developing constellations of ‘social’ and ‘mundane’ technologies in people's everyday lives. These technologies are often simple, minimalist and ‘loose’ and yet support richly layered social interactions that are sustained and develop across time, place, and culture. Despite the success of last year’s event and the quality of the presentations and papers, some issues warrant further exploration. Thus SIMTech ‘08 hopes to consider:

Computer gaming and social life – how computer games support social networks and social worlds;
Technology’s temporality and longevity – the implications of technologies being readily available and ‘at hand’ over time;
The transformations that we perform on technology – the process of how ‘tame’ them, the phasing in making them ordinary;
The rhetoric around technology and how we talk about technology in terms of being 'mundane', 'magical', 'smart' etc.;
Lessons from and methods associated with the long-term deployment of simple technologies in particular settings (e.g. the home, health care settings);
Issues with the potential immortality of technology – concerns with personal data ‘living on’ on after death;
Technology and ‘dark’ emotions – how technology can support anger, perversion, criminal actions, addiction etc;
Digital living – the implications of spending large segments of life engaging with others through technology (e.g. via email, social networking tools, virtual worlds etc.);
Death, technology and memorials – how ordinary technology evoke powerful memories, nostalgia and interact with the grieving process.

Our primary interest is in understanding how 'mundane technologies' really work in people's lives. We are concerned with (but are certainly not restricted to) answering questions like:

What is the role of mundane technologies in sustaining social life?
What are the issues associated with ordinary action being recorded and available long-term?
ow does the use of ordinary technology change over time, if at all?

As with last year's workshop, a secondary interest is how mundane technologies can be useful methodological instruments in the research enterprise and how they can be combined with other, more 'traditional' approaches in social science research, to inform how technology is used and how practices, rhythmsand routines are structured around technology to get work done.

SUBMISSIONS

We accept the following submissions for the workshop:

Full Papers
Please submit a 4-page paper in accordance with the ACM SIG format. All submissions should be submitted to Connor Graham at c.graham [at] lancaster.ac.uk. Submissions should be anonymised: they will be reviewed by the Program Committee and selected on the basis of their relevance and interest.
Posters
Please submit a 2-page paper in accordance with the ACM SIG format. All submissions should be submitted to Connor Graham at c.graham [at] lancaster.ac.uk. Submissions need not be anonymised: they will be reviewed by the Program Committee and selected on the basis of their relevance and interest. Authors of successful poster submissions will be asked to display a poster at the workshop and will briefly present their work.
Proposals
Please submit a 1-page proposal with a brief description of relevant work that you have done/are doing that is relevant to the workshop themes. Successful applicants will be added to the list of participants.

For Full Papers and Posters the following are acceptable submissions:

Position statements;
Work-in-progress;
New themes with old data;
Early reports from the field;
Initial case study findings;
Design proposals.

Full Paper and Poster submissions should clearly describe the nature of the work to be discussed and how the work relates to the themes of the workshop. At the end of the submission, please include points for discussion for the end of the presentation and any references participants should read before the workshop. Full Papers and Posters will be made available to all participants before the workshop.

During the second, half day of the workshop we aim to work on developing workshop submissions. The aim is to consolidate these ideas through planning a further publication: either another special issue of a journal or an edited volume.

All presenters, poster submissions and participants should indicate their planned attendance at the workshop dinner (evening of 20th November) as soon as possible after receiving confirmation of their attendance.

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KEY DATES

Papers due:	24th September* Friday 5th September
Papers notification:	12th October
Final papers due:	24th October*
Posters due:	17th October*
Posters notification:	22nd October
Proposals due:	24th October*
Proposals notification:	27th October
Preliminaries:	19th November
Registration:	20th November
*2400 (EST) to c.graham [at] lancaster.ac.uk

REGISTRATION COSTS

The cost of attending this workshop will be GBP(£)90 (full fee) and GBP(£)50 (student/unemployed). This will include refreshments (e.g. coffee) over the day and a half and a dinner. The cost for the first or second day will be GBP(£)45. This single day fee will include refreshments on that day.

More information is available from the 'registration' page.

PUBLICATION

Initially we will aim at a special issue of a journal. Eventually we intend to publish an edited book from the themes and papers seeded at the workshop.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Please contact Connor Graham for further information: cgraham [at] unimelb.edu.au.

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