Designing Digital Creative Commons for the Performing Arts

14th July 2015, Lincoln, UK

The workshop will run as part of the British HCI 2015 conference held 15-17th July 2015 at Lincoln, UK. For more information please visit http://designdigicommons.org This workshop aims to bring together HCI designers, creative technologists, Performing Arts practitioners and theorists to discuss issues and opportunities in designing digital tools for communication, artistic collaboration, sharing and co-creation between artists, and between artists and actively involved creative audiences. There are numerous existing online platforms that provide immediate and easy access to a vast range of tools for creative collaboration, yet their majority create and maintain networks within a ‘noisy’ social media environment, are based on a centralised model of collaboration, and are built on corporate infrastructures with well-known issues of control, identity, and surveillance. Focusing on the Performing Arts, this workshop will take a bottom-up approach on how to design online collaborative tools without the noise of social media, drawing on peer-to-peer decentralised practices, infrastructures for building communities of interest outside the imperatives of corporate control, developing new kinds of narratives and synergies that add depth to artistic practice, blurring the distinction between artist and audience, and contributing to a true sharing economy. In brief, the workshop’s goals are: - to gain insights on how to design platforms for collaboration that empower the emergence of communities of interest, without the noise of generic social media platforms - and discuss how to build them free of corporate control and to ingrain into the design the choice of anonymity and multiple identities (privacy preserving by default) - consider how to use such platforms to overcome, through increasing digitally-enabled creativity, the negative effects of funding-cuts in the arts and the imperatives of the austerity economy - and how to produce, through emergent creative practices, models for gift and sharing economies that can be facilitated by digital cultures (e.g. open-source software, file-sharing) We invite presentations of relevant work in a range of formats (e.g. position papers, design documents, artifacts, prototype tools). There are no submission restrictions. We encourage the interested parties to send audio, visual, written material in any format. If the files are large you can use services like DropBox or Wetransfer.com. You can send your position work and direct any enquires to: m.dima@qmul.ac.uk, g.briscoe@qmul.ac.uk

The important dates for your diary are:

Submission Deadline: 1st June

Notification: 5th June

Workshop date: 14th July

There is a fee of £75 for the workshop and you can register here : http://hci2015.bcs.org/register/

You do not have to regsiter for the full conference in order to participate to the workshop.