** Call for participation in a workshop at Pervasive '07 ** (Apologies for cross postings.) Nurturing Technologies: Pervasive Systems for Self Reflection, Critique, and Growth - at - Pervasive 2007, the Fifth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 13-16, 2007, Toronto, Ontario, Canada http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/conferences/pervasive2007/index.phtml Workshop URL (details and call for participation): http://www.nurturingtech.org/ Theme: This workshop will explore applications of pervasive technology beyond supporting tasks, instead supporting a more fundamental nurturance: facilitating the long-term growth of people in the face of short-term distractions and obstacles. Current technologies are generally designed to optimize performance in the workplace, home, school, or marketplace, for example by increasing efficiency by minimizing disruptions. In contrast, this workshop will combine social, cultural, and engineering perspectives to explore how technology could support nurturance in such everyday settings and practices, as well as in extraordinary places of respite, recreation, or inspiration. The goals of the workshop are to better understand 1) emerging practices of using technology for nurturance and 2) the larger design space of potential usage models, in order to suggest new directions for pervasive technology research. It is a successor to a workshop on Nurturing Technologies in the Home at UbiComp 2006. We will explore questions such as the following: * What kinds of design strategies are appropriate for nurturing technologies, when we move outside of a narrow focus on task optimization? * How do we encourage reflexive system evaluation, in which value is understood not by measuring how well particular problems are solved, but by judging how important the problems are or how well problems are redefined? * How do we integrate these sometimes critical perspectives into everyday technology design? * To what extent is focusing on technology the right solution? Important Dates: January 26, 2007: Submissions due March 2, 2007: Acceptances sent May 13, 2007: Workshop takes place May 13-16, 2007: Pervasive Conference, Toronto, Canada Please submit your paper as a Word or PDF file by email to scottmainwaring [at] gmail.com Organizers: * Scott D. Mainwaring (Intel) * Ame Elliott (PARC) * Allison Woodruff (Intel) * Phoebe Sengers (Cornell) * Ryan Aipperspach (University of California, Berkeley) --------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send an empty email to mailto:[log in to unmask] For further details of CHI lists see http://sigchi.org/listserv ---------------------------------------------------------------