Design for engagement

Our focus is “Design for Engagement: Civic, Social and Personal.” In recent years the field of interaction design has been exploring a variety of new directions, including civic computing and social computing, critical design, design to promote health, creativity, etc. All of these varied approaches are concerned with design as a means of promoting engagement, often in social, civic, and political issues. At the same time interest has increased in the aesthetics of interaction design, where aesthetics is interpreted broadly (e.g. by Wright and McCarthy) as emotional involvement or engagement with the designed artifact or activity, suggesting a redefinition of the relationship between the user and the artifact. The designer seeks to fashion not only a tool for information retrieval but also an experience that will engage and motivate the user. This question of engagement therefore provides an excellent theme to bring together faculty and PhD students at the IT University of Copenhagen and Georgia Tech. We will examine engagement in focused research areas in which the two faculties now specialize: civic media and social computing, infrastructure and/in design, augmented and mixed reality (especially for cultural heritage), pervasive games and play, interactive narrative, creativity and learning. The goal is to discover which techniques can best promote engagement on the personal and collective levels. We seek to address the questions: are there techniques common to all or most of these research areas?