Thomas Söderqvist The organizers of the International Committee for the History of Technology’s 34th Symposium in Copenhagen, Denmark, 14-18 August 2007 are extending the deadline for proposals until 15 March 2007. The theme of the symposium is “Fashioning Technology: Design from Imagination to Practice” — which, by default, also includes the fashioning and design of medical technologies.
The organizers suggest the following subthemes for the consideration:
- Consequences of design, purposeful and accidental
- National styles in design and technology: myth or fact?
- Embodying design in products
- Social and/or cultural values in the design of products, machines and systems
- Designers: craftsmen, engineers, artists, or something else?
- Fe/male designs: sex and gender in design
- Tweaking technology and products: users as designers
- Imaginary designs: unrealized, utopian and immaterial constructions
- Design history in the context of the history of technology
- Designing consumption from commodities to malls
- Reshaping spaces: landscapes, cityscapes and technoscapes
- The fashioned body: technologies of food, clothing and medicine
- Building technoscience: design in the laboratory
They urge contributors to organize sessions of three or more papers, but individual paper submissions will, of course, be accepted too. And add:
Membership in ICOHTEC is not required to participate in the symposium. INDIVIDUAL PAPER proposals must include: (1) a 250-word (maximum) abstract in English; and (2) a one-page CV. Abstracts should include the author’s name and email address, a short descriptive title, a concise statement of the thesis, a brief discussion of the sources, and a summary of the major conclusions. Please indicate if you intend your paper for one of the specified subthemes. In preparing your paper, remember that presentations are not full-length articles. You will have no more than 20 minutes to speak, which is roughly equivalent to 8 double-spaced typed pages. Contributors are encouraged to submit full-length versions of their papers after the conference for consideration by ICOHTEC’s journal ICON. If you are submitting a paper proposal dealing with a particular subtheme, please indicate this in your proposal, and assist the program committee in assigning your paper to a session. Sessions organized by the program committee will not have a formal commentator but a “respondent” may be appointed to attend the session and give the first comment on the presentations. For more suggestions about preparing your symposium presentation, please consult guidelines available on the ICOHTEC 2007 website. SESSION proposals must include, in addition to abstracts and CVs for each paper as described above: (1) an abstract of the session (250 words maximum), listing the proposed papers, and a chair, as well as a respondent (if desired), for each section; (2) and a one-page CV for each contributor, including chair and respondent. Sessions should consist of at least three speakers, and may include several sections of three speakers each, which might extend over more than one day. Proposal submission Proposals for individual papers and sessions can be entered on the Integrated Digital Conference System at the website for ICOHTEC 2007 http://www.icohtec2007.dk/ If web access is unavailable, proposals may be sent by fax to The Conference Office, ICOHTEC 2007 at +45 4588 3040. Otherwise they may be sent via regular mail postmarked not later than 1 March 2007 to The Conference Office, ICOHTEC 2007, DTV, Postbox 777, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark. The program committee, chaired by Barton C. Hacker, will notify all who submitted proposal of their acceptance or rejection by 1 April 2007. All questions should be submitted to icohtec07@dtv.dk Hope to see you in Copenhagen!
