Workshop Organizers for Design & The City 2016 (Apr 2016, Amsterdam)

Dates: 19-22 April 2016
Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Website: http://designandthecity.eu
Deadline for submission of proposals: 7 December 2015

Call for Workshop Organizers

The Design & The City conference explores citizen-centered design approaches for the smart city, addressing how social media, big data and other digital technologies may contribute to more sustainable, liveable and sociable urban communities. Specific focus of the conference is on the expanding role of designers as initiators, innovators, campaigners, connectors, organizers, critics and imagineers of alternative urban futures.

The conference is organized by the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and takes place at The Knowledge Mile, a living lab in the centre of Amsterdam. It takes place in the context of the Dutch presidency of the EU.

We are inviting proposals from designers, activists, researchers, media labs, and others for workshops to be held on April 22, 2016. Workshops are unique opportunities for engaging practitioners, researchers and conference attendees in a productive discussion.

This call is programmatically inclusive and broad: the Design & the City conference welcomes proposals for workshops that connect urban spaces to design, research, education, art, playfulness and activism. Workshops should involve attendees in concrete discussions and hands-on activities, with the objective of experimenting with new concepts, fostering peer-to-peer discussion and learning-by-doing.

Workshops will take place on Friday April 22, 2016, either as a half-day or full-day activities, ideally with a mid-morning break, a lunch break, and a mid-afternoon break. They should bring attendees together around design issues for citizen-centered smart cities, discussing them in a participatory and/or practical way. Possible examples could include co-design sessions, booksprints, roundtables, hackathons, etc. Workshops should have some kind of tangible output, such as a shared wiki, a curated selection of sketches, a collective paper or an artifact.

Each workshop organizer will produce their own call for participants and will be able to select them. Conference organizers will advertise calls on the main website, and in addition to this workshop organizers will disseminate them in their own networks. Workshop organizers are responsible for documenting the outputs and making them available on a platform of their choice, which will be linked to the main conference website. Conference organizers will arrange for food and coffee, for working space, as well as reasonable logistics and some equipment (such as projectors, whiteboards, wifi access...). Workshop organizers will receive free entrance to the main conference; a small fee will be charged to workshop participants to cover for lunch and other logistics.

Deadline for proposals is December 7, notice of acceptance can be expected in January 2016.

Proposals should include:

1. Workshop title
2. Organizers’ names and short bios
3. Short description of the proposed topic, and its relevance to the general conference theme (300 words max)
4. Short description of the methodologies adopted (e.g. discussion, co-creation, rapid paper prototyping…) (250 words max)
5. Short description of the participants’ required competences, if any, and necessary equipment (e.g. participants should bring a camera and a sketchpad) (250 words max)
6. Short description of the expected outputs, as well as the strategies for making them accessible (250 words max)
7. Duration of the workshop (full-day, half-day) and preferred location (e.g. classroom, open space, itinerant workshop in public areas…)

Proposals should be sent as attachments to info@designandthecity.eu with “Workshop Proposal” in the subject line. You can also reach us at this email address for any further questions.