A Special Issue on "Cultural Aspects of Interaction Design"
The notion of interaction design has become an indispensable aspect of product design and development, especially for those products with embedded information technologies. While traditional industrial design focuses on a product's functionality and its physical features, interaction design focuses on the interactive experience of users. Since products are becoming more pervasively and more tightly interwoven with our daily activities, design calls for a deeper understanding of the diverse perspectives of product use.
Culture has been considered to play a critical role for users in their understanding, acceptance, positioning, and use of an artifact. The quality of an interactive experience is produced in a particular cultural context and is determined or evaluated in that context. Yet, when it comes to incorporating cultural factors effectively in design practice, knowledge is insufficient at all levels -- conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and practical. Cultural factors need to be integrated in the design process in order to achieve the high quality of product interaction that enables our experience with a product to be effective and enjoyable.
For this special issue of the International Journal of Design, they are seeking papers that present breakthroughs in conceptual, theoretical, methodological and practical research that enhance the ormalization of design knowledge with regard to the "cultural aspects of interaction design." In particular, these contributions should focus on representing cultural factors in describable, operable, and usable forms of design knowledge with relevance to interaction design. The following topics are of particular interest, covering fundamental and contemporary issues in this domain:
- Conceptual framework of cultural factors in interaction design
- Acquisition and representation methods for cultural factors in design
- Formal models of cultural factors in interaction design
- Planning, design, and evaluation methods that involve cultural perspectives
- Cultural aspects of interaction methods and languages
- Assessment of the cultural effects of new interactive products
- Cultural factors in Kansei/emotional/affective aspects of interaction
- Cultural contexts of interaction design for ambient intelligence environments
- Cultural factors related to usability
Schedule:
Full Paper Due: 28 February 2008 28 Fe
Notification of Acceptance: 30 April 2008
Final Version of Paper Due: 31 May 2008
Special Issue Publication Date: 1 August 2008
Submission of Papers:
Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the guidelines found at
www.ijdesign.org/authorGuidelines
Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. A double-blind review process will be employed for this special issue.
Manuscripts should be sent through the on-line system at
www.ijdesign.org/submissions
Authors should choose "Special Issue on Cultural Aspects of Interaction Design" as the Journal Section when submitting papers.
Special Issue Editors:
Keiichi Sato
Institute of Design
Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
Tel: 312-595-4912
E-mail: sato@id.iit.edu
Kuohsiang Chen
Department and Institute of Industrial Design
National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Tel: +886 6-2757575, ext. 54335
E-mail: kchen@mail.ncku.edu.tw