Sponsors
This page was last updated 2006-09-18
keynotes
Mary Flanagan - keynote www.maryflanagan.com Associate professor in software art + cullture. Film and Media Studies Hunter College, New York. Mary Flanagan investigates everyday technologies through critical writing, artwork, and activist design projects. Flanagan's work has been exhibited internationally at museums, festivals, and galleries, including: the Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum of American Art, SIGGRAPH, The Banff Centre, The Moving Image Centre, New Zealand, Central Fine Arts Gallery NY, Artists Space NY, the University of Arizona, University of Colorado-Boulder, and venues in Brazil, France, UK, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia. Her projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Pacific Cultural Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Flanagan writes about popular culture and digital media such as computer games, virtual agents, and online spaces in order to understand their affect on culture. Her essays on digital art, cyberculture, and gaming have appeared in periodicals such as Art Journal , Wide Angle , Intelligent Agent, Convergence, and Culture Machine, as well as several books. Her co-edited collection reload: rethinking women + cyberculture with Austin Booth was published by MIT Press in 2002. She is also co-author with Matteo Bittanti of Similitudini. Simboli. Simulacri ( SIMilarities, Symbols, Simulacra ) on The Sims game (in Italian, Unicopli 2003), and the co-editor of the collection re:skin , forthcoming from MIT Press.
Flanagan is also the creator of "The Adventures of Josie True," the first web-based adventure game for girls, and is implementing innovations in pedagogical and values-based game design.
Mary Flanagan holds MFA and MA degrees from the University of Iowa, a BA in Film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a Ph.D. in Computational Media focusing on activist game design from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, UK. She teaches in the Integrated Media Arts MFA program in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, NYC. Her research group and laboratory in New York is called TiltFactor, a lab focused on the design of activists and socially-conscious software.
Ian Bogost Ian Bogost Assistant Professor at The Georgia Institute of Technology, game designer, academic game researcher, and educational publisher.
Ian Bogost is a game designer, academic game researcher, and educational publisher. Currently, Dr. Bogost is Assistant Professor in the at The Georgia Institute of Technology, where he researches on videogame criticism and videogame rhetoric and teaches in the undergraduate program in Computational Media and the graduate program in Digital Media.
Bogost is especially interested in the function of ideology, politics, advertising, and education in games. He is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press 2006), Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric (forthcoming from MIT Press), co-editor (with Matteo Bittanti) of Ludologica Retro: Vintage Arcade Games 1972-1984 (Costa & Nolan), and author of over 50 articles, book chapters, and conference presentations on videogames, digital media, literature, and film. Bogost is co-editor (with Gonzalo Frasca) at Water Cooler Games, the online resource about videogames with an agenda. Bogost has published and presented internationally on game criticism and game rhetoric.
John McCarthy John McCarthy Senior lecturer in the Department of Applied Psychology, University College Cork.
John McCarthy is a psychologist who researches on people’s experiences with technology and teaches on cultural aspects of psychology and technology use.
McCarthy is involved in developing conceptual grounding for the growing but often confused and confusing area of ‘user experience’. Concerned that ‘user experience’ and ‘experience centered design’ might be dismissed as temporary fashions or marketing ploys, McCarthy is keen to highlight the value of attention to experience in areas such as Interaction Design and Human Computer Action. He sees user experience as a corrective to the predominantly cognitive contribution of the human and social sciences in these areas and as having the potential to forge links between the study of interaction with technology and understanding and enriching discourses on self. He has published a book on the subject ‘Technology as Experience’ with Peter Wright (MIT Press 2004) and run a number of workshops in this area (e.g. DAC’2005 and CHI’2006 with Peter Wright, Mark Blythe, and Olav Bertelson). He is currently engaged in further conceptual and empirical work in the area, for example conceptualizing specific experiences such as enchantment (a forthcoming Personal and Ubiquitous Computing themed issue) and carrying out fieldwork on experience with technology in a variety of settings. McCarthy is also involved in developing a critical reflective agenda in HCI (CHI 2006 workshop with Phoebe Sengers and Paul Dourish).