Submission deadline: May 31, 2025.
Articles and Reviews can be submitted in English, Portuguese, French or Spanish.
Guest Editors
Pedro Cardoso, Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, Portugal.
Miguel Carvalhais, Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, Portugal.
Miguel Sicart, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Scope
Human-centred design (HCD) is a central paradigm in interaction design research, teaching, and practice. HCD focuses on the characteristics of the users of the medium or tool being designed, their needs and wants, contexts of usage, and their tasks and workflows. HCD is concerned with learning processes and cognitive stresses and tries to develop products that accommodate humans and are ready-to-hand, promoting user-friendliness, facilitation of workflows, comfort, and a mental state of flow. The successes of HCD philosophies and methodologies, and their role in shaping the current media landscape are undeniable, but they are not without downsides.
The application of HCD methods can result in media and tools that are conducive to hedonistic loops — the optimisation and normalisation of what is already known and familiar to users — and to the overuse of strategies and patterns that exploit computational media’s potential for persuasiveness. This may result in diminished critical thinking and metacognition in users. Mistaking usability with effortlessness can lead to negative impacts on diversity and to increases in radicalisation, as well as to a dilution of the ergodic potential, impairing the creation of meaning and the development of creative processes, as well as increasing alienation, something which is paradoxically opposed to one of the main goals of flow theory. Ultimately, HCD’s methods can incentivise shallow relationships with digital media and other humans, leading to unreflected interactions and convergent thinking.
This special issue of the JDMI intends to explore current discourses and practices, providing updated knowledge on theories, models, methods, frameworks, strategies, principles, patterns, or tools, for countering these shortcomings. The focus of the issue is on strategies to induce friction in the interaction with computational systems and how this may lead to increases in meaningfulness and the quality of experience with computational artefacts. The issue welcomes papers and review articles as well as more speculative essays and position papers. We invite original and unpublished contributions addressing theoretical and practical applications. Contributions are encouraged to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on how we interact today with computational media and want to interact with it in the future.
Topics of Interest
Submissions are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:
All papers must be original and not submitted elsewhere (preprints accepted).
More information at https://proa.ua.pt/index.php/jdmi/call_2025_2