The 27th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, with its emphasis on communication and information, and its strong links to library and information science, design studies, and cognitive and computer science will be soliciting research papers, workshop proposals, experience reports, and posters are invited that emphasize the following thematic challenges:

• What do we mean by disciplinarity, intradisciplinarity, interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary? Why do we maintain that this is a strength of ACM SIGDOC? How can your unique expertise or design experience contribute to a compelling future for the developing discipline of communication design?
• What do you see as the role of disciplinary expertise in problem solving, innovation, communication design and business process design, knowledge creation and management for the 21st century?
• What new economic realities and geopolitical issues do you see for communication designers?
• In preparing the next generation of communication designers, what abilities, attributes, prior knowledge and backgrounds, tasks and activities, competencies and contexts do you see as central?
• How would you describe the state of the field, based on past reflections and historically significant developments, accelerated environments and artifacts, or unrealized potentials?
• What emerging studies can you share on personalization, mediation, work and genre ecologies and activities, technical and educational opportunities and the challenges of sustainability and sharing?

See sigdoc.org for more information.

According to Scott Delman, ACM Group Publisher:

ACM is pleased to announce a new innovation for subscribers to interactions, the leading magazine publication for the Human Computer Interactions community. As from the January-February 2008 issue, ACM will be offering a digital edition of each issue of the magazine as an added benefit to subscribers. This new offering is provided in addition to the current print edition of the magazine and articles posted in the ACM Digital Library. The magazine’s new digital edition will serve as an additional service that will enable members to view a true digital representation of the entire print magazine from cover to cover in an easy to use digital format.

The “added benefit to subscribers” part may be an indication that ACM plans or at least reserves the right to pull the online version under the account firewall. For the time being, the images and navigation are a nice way to read the content assembled by editors Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko.

I was particularly interested in Steve Portigal’s rant on personas, a continual point of debate in HCI. A very diverse range of global perspectives, including a rather insightful Gary Marsden.

Startup Weekend recruits a few dozen highly motivated people to build a community and company in a weekend. Tickets for Bloomington Startup Weekend will be sold for $20 online. Some scholarship opportunities and childcare may be available, as well.

There are 7 main areas of expertise that participants can sign up for:

• Design
• Developer
• PR/ Marketing
• Business Development
• User Experience
• Legal
• Project Management

Other skill sets are welcome. The most important attribute is a willingness to contribute all three days of the weekend. Make sure to get tickets early, it will most likely sell out fast. For more information, visit our local event blog and pre-event Ning community.

This is a community event organized by local students and technology professionals. Participants from past weekends have raved about the quality of professional friendships made and the opportunity to evaluate people in the context of project work.

The conference theme for this Participatory Design Conference, PDC 2008, is Experiences and Challenges. Join us to celebrate two decades of biennial PDCs. We invite you to reflect on past experiences and review the important lessons we have learned so as to better meet the new challenges of the future. What are the important trends, phenomena, developments, and views on participation and design etc., which in so many different ways challenge our traditions, our experiences and/or the current ‘wisdom’ within the field?

Participatory Design (PD) is a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, tools, environments, businesses, and social institutions more responsive to human needs. A central tenet of PD is the direct involvement of people in the co-design of things and technologies they use. Participatory Design Conferences have been held every two years since 1990 and have formed an important venue for international discussion of the collaborative, social, and political dimensions of technology innovation and use.

The conference bring together a multidisciplinary and international group of software developers, researchers, social scientists, managers, designers, practitioners, users, cultural workers, activists and citizens who both advocate and adopt distinctively participatory approaches in the development of information and communication artifacts, systems, services and technology. A central concern has always been to understand how collaborative design processes can be driven by the participation of the people affected by the technology designed.

I am pleased to introduce you to several local bloggers of potential interest to the UX community. Current students and faculty in the HCI program at the School of Informatics include:

Marty Siegel, faculty

Erik Stolterman, faculty

Christian Briggs, Ph.D. student

Heekyoung Jung, Ph.D. student

Justin Donaldson, Ph.D. student

Kevin Makice, Ph.D. student

Marty McCrory, Ph.D. student

Richie Hazlewood, Ph.D. student

Will Ryan, Ph.D. student

Aaron Houssian

Amber Kim

Ankit Khare

Balakrishna Chennupati

David Roedl

Jamie McAtee

Jason de Runa

Kenton Hankins

Kshitiz Anand

Mike Madison

Mingxian Chang

Shruti Bhandari

Tyler Pace

Vignesh Ramesh

HCI/d Course Blogs: Orange, Blue, Purple, Red, and Green

Virtual Worlds for Serious Use

HCI Design Evaluation Methods

Interaction Culture

Other local technology blogs include:

First: Principles and Bloomington Geek Dinners (Ben Fulton)

geek-guides (Elijah Wright)

Storygeek (Mark Bell)

UberNoggin and Second Life Education Research (Sarah Robbins)