information+ presentations workshops exhibition registration supporters about


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+ is committed to enabling a diverse, inclusive and respectful environment where all participants can learn, network, and enjoy planned activities. We are dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone.

Information+ will be held in-person between November 22nd – 24th, 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.



In past years of Info+, presentations have covered a broad range of topics in information design and visualization, including:

General topics:

  • Ethical considerations;
  • Design processes;
  • Education;
  • Diversity and inclusion;
  • Modalities of data representations (touch, sound, taste, .. );
  • Novel technology and AI;
Domain-specific:
  • Social and political issues;
  • The environment and climate action;
  • Advocacy and law;
  • Health and medical applications;
  • Cultural analysis and collections;
  • Digital humanities;
  • Data journalism.

Program

Stay tuned for more to come!

Keynote Speakers

Portrait of Stefanie Posavec

Stefanie Posavec

stefanieposavec.com

Stefanie Posavec is a designer, artist, and author focused on creating playful, experimental, human-scaled approaches to communicating with data.

Her work has been exhibited at major galleries including the V&A, the Design Museum (Designs of the Year 2016), Somerset House, the Wellcome Collection, Bletchley Park (all UK), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and MoMA (New York), where her work is also in the permanent collection. Her latest illustrated book (I am a book. I am a portal to the universe., co-authored with Miriam Quick) has received multiple accolades, including winning the UK Royal Society's Young People's Book Prize 2021. She has also co-authored two previous books: Dear Data and the journal Observe, Collect, Draw!

Portrait of Shannon Vallor

Shannon Vallor

shannonvallor.net

Shannon Vallor's research explores the philosophy and ethics of emerging science and technologies.

Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, where she directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute. A Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, Professor Vallor's research maps the ethical challenges and opportunities posed by new uses of data and artificial intelligence. Her work includes advising academia, government and industry on the ethical design and use of AI, and she co-leads the UKRI’s Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID) programme. She is the author of Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford University Press, 2016) and editor of the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology (2022). She is the recipient of multiple awards for teaching, scholarship and public engagement, including the 2022 Covey Award and the 2015 World Technology Award in Ethics.

Portrait of Ebru Kurbak

Ebru Kurbak

ebrukurbak.net

Ebru Kurbak is an artist whose practice critically explores entanglements between art, technology, culture, and power.

The focus of her recent work has been on the implications of the historical social and spatial segregation of knowledge(s), with a particular emphasis on textiles and women's work. She has held residencies at renowned art and technology institutions such as La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), LABoral Cultural Center (Gijon) and EYEBEAM (New York). Her work has been exhibited in international venues such as the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Siggraph (US), Microwave Festival (Hong Kong), Istanbul Design Biennial (Istanbul), Piksel Festival (Bergen), and the MAK - Museum of Applied Arts Vienna (Vienna), among others. In 2019, she was awarded the LACMA Art + Technology Grant by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She currently is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she runs the artistic research project "The Museum of Lost Technology" (2020 - 2024), funded by the Austrian Science Fund.

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

Logo of XYZ

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.

Registration

Registration will open in July 2023.

About

Information+ 2023 is made possible through the help and support of many people and partnering organizations.

Conference Chairs

email chairs

Uta Hinrichs, University of Edinburgh

Benjamin Bach, University of Edinburgh

Submission Chairs

email chairs

Miriah Meyer, Linköping University

Dietmar Offenhuber, Northeastern University

Workshops & Activity Chairs

email chairs

Georgia Panagiotidou, King's College London

Samuel Huron, Telecom Paris Tech

Supporters Chairs

Daniel Archambault, Newcastle University

Cagatay Turkay, Warwick University

Exhibition Chairs

email chairs

Pedro Cruz, Northeastern University

Carmen Hull, Northeastern University

Web, Design & Communication Chairs

Derya Akbaba, Linköping University

Tobias Kauer, University of Edinburgh

Zine Chair

Andrew McNutt, University of Chicago

Social Chair

Areti Manataki, University of St. Andrews

Sarah Schöttler, University of Edinburgh

Program Committee

Matthew Brehmer, Tableau

Pedro Cruz, Northeastern University

Rodrigo Medeiros, IFPB

Doris Kosminsky, UFRJ

Till Nagel, University of Applied Sciences Mannheim

Angus Forbes, University of California, Santa Cruz

Charles Perin, University of Victoria

Fearn Bishop, British Broadcasting Corporation

Laura Perovich, Northeastern University

Lisa-Charlotte Muth, Datawrapper

Alireza Karduni, IDEO

Trevor Hogan, Munster Technological University

Mushon Zer-Aviv, Shenkar College

Dominikus Baur, none

Christopher Collins, Ontario Tech University

Alice Thudt, Interface Designer & Researcher

Katherine Gillieson, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Lauren Klein, Emory University

Meghan Kelly, Durham University

Barbara Castro, State University of Rio de Janeiro

Maria De Los Ángeles Briones, Politecnico di Milano

Catarina Maçãs, University of Coimbra, CISUC, DEI

Rahul Bhargava, Northeastern University

Jonathan Schwabish, Urban Institute

Michele Mauri, Politecnico di Milano

Sarah Hayes, Munster Technological University

Tatiana Losev, Simon Fraser University

Clio Andris, Georgia Tech

Luiz Morais, Voxar Labs

Moritz Stefaner, Independent Designer & Consultant

Yuri Engelhardt, University of Twente

Kennedy Elliott, National Geographic

Nathalie Vladis, Brandeis University

Heather Corcoran, Washington University in St. Louis

Social Media & Updates

For updates, find us on Twitter: @InfoPlusConf
and Mastodon: @InfoPlusConf@vis.social

For mentions, use the hashtag: #infoplus2023