My workshop proposal (with Brooke Foucault and Sunny Consolvo) was accepted to Ubicomp 2005. Hooray! It's in Tokyo. I've never been to Tokyo before. I'm very excited.
Ubicomp is an annual conference for people engaged in the wild pursuit of 'invisible computing' - that is, computation so intimately bound up in everyday life that it ceases to feel like 'technology' and effectively disappears. While previously a forum for engineers, Ubicomp is increasingly attended by a diverse lot (mostly academic, though) of social scientists and designers.
The workshop is called "Monitoring, measuring, and motivating exercise: ubiquitous computing to support physical fitness". It addresses:
the role of ubiquitous computing in promoting physical activity. Discussion topics include: mobile and wearable devices for physically active people, culturally dependent definitions of “fitness” and “activity,” why and how we design motivational interfaces, sensors and other technologies that monitor and assess physical activity, as well as the legal and ethical concerns raised by potentially combining persuasive computing and biometric monitoring.
I'm also planning to include a lot of discussion on mobility and physical gaming, since that's what I've been interested in for a while. There will also be some playing around with pedometers and possibly some exploration of the surrounding neighborhood.
I myself find our workshop title somewhat daunting. But it adequately represents each author's interests, and sounds appropriately academic. While very proud of the careful wording of the title and the proposal, I'm inviting all those reading this blog to read it as:
It Wouldn't Hurt To Get Out More: Technologies That Get You Off That Chair
Thanks. And please do feel free to email me with any questions or comments if you'd like to submit.
