Logic List Mailing Archive

CfP special issue of Philosophy & Technology on "Information Architecture", deadline for expressions of interest: 26 Jul 2017

# Special Issue of Philosophy and Technology on "Information Architecture and 
the Design of the Infosphere"

The question of what has to be done to ensure that information can be 
obtained, organised, and be placed in the right context is a concern that 
the philosophy of information shares with information architecture; the 
practice ? and associated discipline ? of deciding how to arrange the 
parts of something to be understandable (?What is Information 
Architecture?? The Information Architecture Insitute).

A dialogue between these two disciplines was initiated during a 
[workshop](https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/information-architecture-meets-the-philosophy-of-information/) 
held at the University of Oxford in June 2016. It included presentations 
that address the role of design as it applies to the conception of 
informational artefacts and the way we shape and organise the infosphere 
by Vicky Buser, Luke Church, Terence Fenn, Andrew Hinton, Jason Hobbs, Dan 
Klyn, Andrea Resmini, and Konstantin Weiss.

By publishing a special issue of the journal Philosophy and Technology on 
this topic, we want to give the original participants to the workshop the 
opportunity to publish the work they initially presented, create a 
permanent record of the thoughts exchanged during that workshop, and at 
the same time open up this ongoing dialogue to neighbouring disciplines, 
and welcome contributions and input from scholars as well as practitioners 
interested in information architecture, designing a better infosphere, and 
more general ethical and philosophical perspectives on design practices 
and digital technologies.

The project we?d like to put forward as editors is the study of 
theoretical questions related to design as an epistemic practice, and the 
practical challenges that arise from technological changes like the 
blurring of the boundaries between offline and online, or between the 
digital and the physical. This blurring is the central concern of 
pervasive information architecture, a recent development in information 
architecture that is explicitly concerned with how information is conveyed 
and/or accessed across many mediums, contexts, and levels of abstraction. 
Such developments have rendered most of our interactions with information 
messier than ever before, have radically altered the nature of the 
infosphere, and raise issues that will only become more urgent with the 
proliferation of environments where human and non-human ways of 
understanding and processing information co-exist.

Addressing these concerns calls for innovative design solutions as well as 
for deeper conceptual understanding. We need better ways of understanding, 
conceptualising, and expressing the design challenges and requirements 
that arise from the abundance of semantically and technologically 
heterogeneous informational contexts.

### Topics

+ Practical and theoretical challenges raised by pervasive and 
cross-channel Information Architecture. + Languages and theories of design 
and design patterns. + Spatial models and metaphors of the infosphere. + 
The concepts of space, place, and place-making. + Interdisciplinary 
perspectives on Information Architecture. + Critical perspectives on the 
discipline of Information Architecture. + Innovative connections between 
the philosophy of information, and the applied sciences of information 
(LIS, IS, IA). + Philosophical relevance of design as an epistemic 
practice. + Ethical perspectives on responsible design and the care for 
the infosphere.

### Timetable

The editors expect to receive expressions of interest by the 26th of July 
2017 (a title, and 200-300 word description of the topic to be sent by 
email to patrick.allo@oii.ox.ac.uk), and will provide feedback on the 
basis of these proposals. Full papers should be submitted by the 26th of 
September 2017 via the [journal?s online submission 
system](http://www.editorialmanager.com/phte/), as a special article type 
?SI on Information Architecture and the Design of the Infosphere?.

Download the official call for papers 
[here](https://www.dropbox.com/s/7yx6izk0mp8uasq/CfP_IA_Design_Infosphere.pdf?dl=0).

The editors
Andrea Resmini
David Peter Simon
Patrick Allo
--
[LOGIC] mailing list
http://www.dvmlg.de/mailingliste.html
Archive: http://www.illc.uva.nl/LogicList/

provided by a collaboration of the DVMLG, the Maths Departments in Bonn and Hamburg, and the ILLC at the Universiteit van Amsterdam