August 14-17 members from IDAC will participate in organizing a hackers club for children aged 8-12. For more information see www.hackerklubben.se

On June 20 Wolmet was promoted to associate professor (docent is Swedish) in Interaction Design at the Department ofApplied IT and gave a talk about her research.

CHItaly 2013 Workshop – VGDESIGN 2013: First Workshop on Teaching Design for Vulnerable Generations: Children and Elderly. In conjunction with “CHItaly 2013 – Building Social Innovation” Trento, 16-19 September 2013

SUMMARY AND THEME

In today’s society, while children and elderly are gaining influence they can still be considered in a broad sense as groups of vulnerable people. In many cases, they have less control of their lives and are more dependent on others to help out with various kinds of things than the average population. In addition to this, they may also have various kinds of cognitive and physical restrictions. For these reasons the term vulnerable generations will be used to denote the group children and elderly as a whole.

In line with their increased influence, there is a growing awareness of the needs of vulnerable generations.  Innovative use of design specifically targeted towards these groups’ special needs can contribute greatly to the improvement of their wellbeing, preventing them from facing difficult or stressful situations. However, less work has been spent on developing teaching modules for design methods and practices aiming at covering the needs of elderly and children. Accordingly, more work is needed on design for these groups.

GOALS AND EXPECTED AUDIENCE

The workshop address how designers of the future can build social innovation for vulnerable generations and thereby address important social challenges, and is a forum where educators from different fields within design can meet and exchange experiences from teaching.

The workshop intends to bring together educators, designers, and practitioners to explore the sensitive issues regarding designing technical solutions for vulnerable generations, to discuss training needs from different perspectives, and to share best practice methods to teach designers how to design technologies for vulnerable generations – elderly and children.

SUBMISSION FORMAT

Interested participants are invited to submit 2-4 page position papers offering perspectives on these topics, using the ACM CHI Extended abstract format http://chi2013.acm.org/authors/format/#extendedformat .

Submissions must be made via the conference submission system at: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vgdesign2013. Over length or badly formatted submissions will be rejected without any further review process. The accepted position papers will be published on the workshop web page http://www.deviceproject.eu/chitaly_workshop. The website will also be used for community building and discussions.

DEADLINES

July 1^th  Deadline for position papers

July 15^th Notification of acceptance

Sept 16-19^th  Conference

ORGANIZERS

Eva Eriksson – Interaction Designer and Lecturer at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden)

Olof Torgersson – Program Director of Chalmers’ master’s programme in interaction design (Sweden)

Caterina Calefato – PhD in Computer Science, Coordinator of the EU-funded project DEVICE (Italy)

Roberto Montanari – PhD, Coordinator of Human Machine Interaction Group, member of  ICOOR – Interuniversity Consortium for Optimization and Operations Research, (Italy)

Chiara Ferrarini – PhD in Innovation Engineering at University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Interaction Engineer within RE:Lab S.r.l. (Italy)

IDAC was officially launched when Eva gave a talk at the Department of Applied IT summer conference on the 13th of June, 2013.

On the 17th of June, Eva gave an invited talk at the Next Library conference (www.nextlibrary.net) on the topic “Intertwine and Play! Re-imagining library as a learning centre – for creativity, innovation an play”. Evas talk adressed how IT can be used as an creative design material, and what means and methods can be used to create engagement, based on examples from designing with children.

Gothenburg Working Group for Interaction Design and Children (IDAC) is a joint venture between the Department of  Applied IT at Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg and Interactive Institute Swedish ICT. IDAC is a working group consisting of researchers and practitioners focused on designing interaction for and with children in Sweden. The group was formed in 2013.