Information+
Conference 2023

Information+ is an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers, educators, and practitioners in information design and data visualization to discuss common questions and challenges in these rapidly changing fields. Information+ seeks to foster productive exchanges amongst the variety of people involved in the theories, practices and pedagogies of analyzing and communicating information.

Information+ will be held in-person between November 22^nd – 24^th, 2023 at the University of Edinburgh, at minimal cost to attendees. Building on the experiences from the previous installments of Information+ 2016 at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, Information+ 2018 at University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, and a virtual Information+ 2021, we seek to significantly broaden the base of our interdisciplinary community. Again an in-person event, we want to emphasize exchange and community building.

The conference invites three types of contributions: Presentations, Workshops & Activities, and Exhibition Pieces. We invite proposals from all relevant fields and areas of professional practice, research, and pedagogy. We seek submissions of critical thoughts, theories, practices, and experiences around information design and data visualization and relevant application areas from both academic and non-academic perspectives including the humanities and science, art and design, and all related (interdisciplinary) fields.

Call for Presentations

We are explicitly calling for presentations that will engage the community in timely, thought-provoking, and interdisciplinary conversations about information design and data visualization, including their design, assessment, and implications for society. We are looking for diverse positions and topics, and we especially encourage submissions from practitioners, artists, academics, and others that are not usually represented at visualization and data-oriented venues.

We are seeking presentations that motivate, inspire, and challenge the community, and that most importantly have the potential to spur cross-disciplinary conversations and ideas. Presentations can take many forms, including provocations, reflections, challenges, experiments, and works-in-progress. We invite new perspectives, ideas, or cross-disciplinary connections, and welcome presentation experiments that play with different modalities, performances, and audience participation.

Accepted submissions will be presented in-person (no online) in a single-track at the conference. Presentation lengths can vary between 5 and 15 minutes, followed by open discussions with conference participants. The program will be curated by an international programme committee and a jury, with an emphasis on promoting cross-disciplinary conversations.

Submission

Proposals for a presentation must include a pitch statement (max 3000 char) that considers the following questions:

• What is the topic of your presentation?
• What will attendees learn or experience?
• Why is it important for the Info+ community?

Your proposal must also include a description of the anticipated form of your presentation (max 1000 char): is it a provocation, a reflection, a challenge, an experiment, a work-in-progress? Will there be non-traditional components to the presentation? What is the proposed length of your talk: 5-10 mins, 10-20 mins?

Optionally, proposals may include (static) materials to help reviewers assess the potential of your presentation. These materials must be uploaded in the form of a PDF.

In case of questions about presentations, contact: infoplus-presentations@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk

Call for Workshops & Activities

Workshops offer opportunities for discussion, hands-on experiences, and networking. Activities offer opportunities for brief exercises that engage the conference attendees with data and visual representation (for instance through ice-breakers, sketching, data humor or demonstrations). We envision multiple possibilities such as running pop-up activities in the main room with all the attendees, to hands-on design workshops with smaller groups of 2 hours or even half-day community building events.

We are looking for proposals that provoke reflection, educate participants on existing or emerging topics, create a community of practice, or stimulate discussion by bringing complementary in person hands-on activities to the conference. Workshops and Activities can cover all the conference topics and beyond for instance creative programming, constructing data sculptures, interventions in the streets of Edinburgh, or using data as a critical lens for social good, intersectional feminism, decolonialism and sustainability.

Workshops and Activities can run anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours with an estimated attendance of 2 to 200 people. Experimental and unconventional formats are especially welcome and can happen in the main audience hall, in dedicated seminar rooms or elsewhere in the city.

Submission

Proposal submissions for Workshops and Activities should contain the following information:

• duration,
• number of expected or max attendees,
• a description of the workshop goals,
• the process and the expected outcome of the workshop,
• any constraints to run the workshop (e.g., spaces, material, participant experience, etc.)
• how this workshop contributes to the conference and community.

In case of questions about presentations, contact: infoplus-workshops@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk

Exhibition — Call for Entries

A design exhibition held at the Information+ conference

At the Information+ exhibition we aim at showcasing recent contributions to the visual and material communication of information. We are looking for thought-provoking or radically designed pieces that derive from collaboration among disciplines, or from an interdisciplinary practice. We are welcoming individual or group submissions of data representation and visualization pieces in which the main intent is the communication of information. These pieces will be showcased during the Information+ conference at Inspace, an exhibition space of the Institute of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

We welcome submissions in a multitude of mediums such as video (projected or displayed), interactive technology, physical and sculptural, drawings and illustrations, and digital prints. Additionally, we are also interested in showcasing the design process behind some of the featured pieces, together with all their dead-ends and accidental designs. If the work has been exhibited before, we will ask you to disclose this, and favor a new framing or interpretation linking the work to the conference and the exhibition.

We are looking for a broad diversity of contributions, people, and topics, and we especially encourage practitioners, designers, artists, academics, and others who are not usually represented at visualization and other data-oriented venues. A limited example of practices and applications we are looking for are:

• Communication of science
• Data journalism and storytelling
• Design studies and visual explorations
• Digital humanities
• Automated (AI) visualizations
• Materiality of visualizations (i.e. physicalizations or performances)
• Graphic systems for data representation
• Metaphoric portrayals of data
• Data-embedded architecture, situated or environmental data

The work will be selected by the Exhibition chairs in consultation with the conference’s organizing committee. All accepted work will be featured on this website, and in an online and printed catalog. Authors of the pieces will be asked to give a short artist talk introducing their work at the opening of the exhibition. The authors will work with the conference organizers on details for showcasing their pieces in the exhibition. Exhibiting artists will get complimentary registrations to the Information+ conference. No artist fees are provided. If accepted, we can subsidize travel costs in certain cases: please reach out to the Exhibition chairs if you don’t have a supporting institution to subsidize your travel expenses.