Friday 7 June 2013

First Workshop on Teaching Design for Vulnerable Generations: Children and Elderly @ CHItaly 2013

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
Interested participants are invited to submit a 2-4 page position paper offering perspectives on the workshop topics, using the ACM CHI Extended abstracts format.  Submissions must be made via the conference submission system  . 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. The website will also be used for community building and discussions.
DEADLINES
July 1th  Deadline for position papers
July 15th Notification of acceptance
Sept 16-19th  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, Interaction Engineer within RE:Lab S.r.l. (Italy)