Following the agenda of the conference in Helsinki: The Good the Bad and the Irrelevant (organized by Media Lab Helsinki's Arki research group), this second conference aims at creating new knowledge about users’ creativity and facilitate their empowerment in a broadband information society.
As Kari-Hans and Sanna are involved in the organization of the event you will see some "seeds" of arki thoughts in there. Contributions from arki and our friends are expected!
Deadline for abstracts is the 10th of january 2007
more info and complete call for papers:
http://conference.cost298.org/
The conference has 4 main themes:
- Users as innovators
- Humans as eActors
- The multiple cultures of the Information Society
- Future directions
Note this 2 particulary relevant to our work:
Users as innovators
Within the changing techno-economic paradigm, the user is increasingly seen as the origin of innovation. This refers to strategic roles like ‘lead users’ or ‘pro-am’ in technology design. At the same time powerful Web 2.0 tools (blogging, social software, folksonomies, etc) enable an affluence of ‘user generated content’ (UGC) based on the ‘networked individualism’ of people. However the user as innovator also refers to more tactical roles. Users of ICTs have often used technologies in very creative, sometimes unanticipated, ways. This refers to ways in which ICTs either enable or constrain users’ ability to develop innovatory social practices, linked to technology design and content creation.
Future directions
Both the technological environment and wider society are evolving through a process of mutual interaction. Even if we accept that the results and acceptance of technological developments in society cannot be reliably predicted, it is also clear that vast investments are being made in the intentional development of technologies, including broadband technologies, with certain aims and strategies. These are inevitably based on certain sets of assumptions about the future. In fact, all such future-oriented action is based on some kind of a vision about the future, whether it is explicitly articulated or not. These intentions and assumptions have a great influence upon the whole development agenda, the specific development processes, and the results of these endeavours.
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