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Rural HCI - a full day Workshop at the OzCHI conference in Canberra, Australia, 29 November 2011.

Call for Papers / Proposals

Computer technology over the past decades has decreased in size, and at the same time has become increasingly networked. The field of Human-Computer Interaction research and design addresses this through ubiquitous, pervasive and ambient computing paradigms. Whereas most of this research concentrates on the home and work environments in urban areas, more research is needed into the possibilities of interaction on the rural and landscape scale. Rural HCI is where the electronic ecology meets the natural ecology and human-made landscape. For instance, the ecological stance of permaculture is very much about distributed (rather than centralised) food production and consumption, and system design with shorter and more sustainable loops. The currently very relevant discussions around the de-centralised energy 'harvesting' follow this approach too. These are examples of approaches that can lead to more efficiency, less waste and generally contribute to the sustainability of practices.
Rural HCI aims to bring together these important social, cultural, technical and conceptual approaches with a structured response from the field of interactive technologies. With the workshop we intent to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field of rural-scale interaction, in order to establish what the issues are, and how to approach the problematics. The workshop aims to develop new guidelines, practical knowledge and theoretical frameworks.

Possible topics:
agriculture
distributed energy generation
permaculture
sub-urban scale interaction
landscape design and art
remote presence
distributed energy storage
sustainability, pollution
tele-health, remote rehabilitation,
social and cultural issues related to rural and outback
gardening
bushfire prevention
water management
remote sensing and actuating
multimodal interaction paradigms
social networking
energy harvesting
technical factors: long range wireless and mesh networks, NBN
geographic information systems (GIS)
navigation (incl GPS), mapping
information representation
indigenous cultures attitudes and knowledge relating to the land
artistic practices and responses to sustainability

Preparation:
•	Participants are expected to submit a position paper and/or another contribution in the form of an installation, a manifesto, a demonstrator, or a prototype.
•	Paper Proposals and Expressions of Interest of max. 4 pages can be submitted in any format and lay out (PDF files preferred) by the 7 October Deadline.
•	Final submission format details for accepted contributions will be announced nearer the time.
•	Prepare a 10-15 minute presentation for the Workshop as a basis for further discussions and contribution to the aims of the workshop.

Timeline:
7 October Paper proposals / position papers due
4 November Notification of acceptance
18 November Final papers due
Tuesday 29 November: workshop

Workshop organisers: Bert Bongers (UTS) (contact person, <mailto:bertbon@xs4all.nl>bertbon@xs4all.nl), Elise van den Hoven (TU Eindhoven), Jon Pearce (University of Melbourne), Stuart Smith (NeuRA) and Tarsha Finney (UTS).

More information on the web site:
http://www.educ.dab.uts.edu.au/interactivation/RuralHCI/

and the poster (attached and/or downloadable from downloaded from
<http://www.bertbongers.com/RuralHCIposter>http://www.bertbongers.com/RuralHCIposter)

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