[csaa-forum] Technology symposium featuring Rafael Calvo and Tania Lewis next Tuesday, VU at MetroWest

[Isabelle deSolier]

Can technology be designed to make us happier, help us flourish, and foster human potential?

How can we use technology to explore increasingly popular social movements such as community gardens?

The Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing at Victoria University invites you to Footscray's MetroWest on Tuesday 4 August from 2.00pm-4.30pm to hear two leading researchers discuss the intersection of digital technology and human potential.

The University of Sydney's Professor Rafael Calvo is an international leader of the burgeoning 'positive computing' field, and will explore the design of technology for psychological wellbeing and human potential. Rafael is an author of the popular book 'Positive Computing' (MIT Press: 2014).
RMIT's Associate Professor Tania Lewis is an expert on lifestyle and consumption, especially urban and suburban practices of sustainability. The author of Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise (Peter Lang: 2008) and editor of TV Transformations (Routledge: 2009), Tania will discuss the use of digital ethnographic methods to explore growing city-based green movements including the 'Permablitz' and community gardens.


The free symposium will be followed by coffee, cake and community discussion.

WHERE:                                   VU at METROWEST, 138 Nicholson Street, Footscray

DATE AND TIME:                    Tuesday 4 August 2015 2.00pm-4.30pm

RSVP to Kim Richardson by Friday 31 July: kim.richardson at vu.edu.au<mailto:kim.richardson at vu.edu.au> or 9919 4362.

Online event details are here: http://www.vu.edu.au/news-events/events/symposium-exploring-human-potential-through-technology
Please see below for full abstracts and biographies.


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Positive Computing: Technologies for psychological wellbeing and human potential

Digital technologies have made their way into all the aspects of our lives that, according to psychology, influence our wellbeing -- everything from social relationships and curiosity to engagement and learning.  By bringing together research and methodologies well-established in psychology, education, neuroscience and human-computer interaction, we can begin to cultivate a new field dedicated to the design and development of technology that supports wellbeing and human potential. Positive computing has been call the "buzzword you need to know for 2015" by the Washington Post and Forbes

More specifically, in this seminar I will present an introduction to our Human-Computer interaction work aiming to support psychological wellbeing. The suggested HCI framework builds on psychology, education, design and other disciplines addressing intrapersonal factors of wellbeing such as motivation, engagement, reflective thought and mindfulness, interpersonal factors such as empathy, and extrapersonal such as altruism.

For more information visit http://positivecomputing.org/

Rafael Calvo is Professor at the University of Sydney, and ARC Future Fellow. He has taught at several Universities, high schools and professional training institutions. He worked at the Language Technology Institute in Carnegie Mellon University, Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina) and on sabbaticals at the University of Cambridge and the University of Memphis. Rafael also has worked as an Internet consultant for projects in the US, Australia, Brasil, and Argentina. Rafael is the recipient of 5 teaching awards for his work on learning technologies, and the author of two books and many publications in the fields of learning technologies, affective computing and computational intelligence. Rafael is Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies and of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and Senior Member of IEEE. Rafael is Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing and co-author of "Positive Computing" (MIT Press) with Dorian Peters. For more information visit: http://rafael-calvo.com/

Getting your hands dirty: using digital methods to explore the 'Permablitz' and other green suburban transformations

A growing interest in environmental issues within the community has seen suburban backyards, streets, houses and curbsides become sites of experimentation around sustainable lifestyle practices. What might the rise of these kinds of lifestyle politics mean for conceptualizing scale, citizenship, and social change in the contemporary moment?

Here, I will discuss how digitally-based 'sensory ethnography' methods such as digital video and photography can capture such enactments, and the ways in which combined media methods can enable researchers to both document and participate in the politics and practices of lifestyle transformation.

By drawing on social practice theory and its focus on the embodied, habitual and more-than-human elements of everyday practices, I argue that green suburban lifestyle initiatives such as 'permablitzes' are transformational in a number of ways. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of how such a participatory research agenda might be translated into an environmental planning and policy approach that draws upon and enables the distributed agency, creativity and performative energies of community-led green practices

Tania Lewis is an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Her research focuses on lifestyle and consumption with a particular emphasis on urban and suburban practices of sustainability. She is the author of Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise (Peter Lang: 2008), editor of TV Transformations (Routledge: 2009), and co-editor of Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2011). She recently completed a monograph (with co-authors Fran Martin and Wanning Sun) for Duke University Press  entitled Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia and is co-editing two collections for Routledge, Green Asia and Lifestyle Media in Asia. She is a chief investigator (with Kim Humphery) on the ARC discovery project, 'Ethical Consumption: From the Margins to the Mainstream' (2013-15), and (with Yolande Strengers) on the three-year project 'Work-life ecologies: lifestyle, sustainability, practices', funded by RMIT's Sustainable Urban Precincts Project. She recently completed a two year project on environmental equity with the Environment Protection Agency in Victoria.



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Dr Isabelle de Solier
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Food, Health, Memory and African Australian Transitions
Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing
Footscray Nicholson Campus
Victoria University
Phone: +61 3 9919 5657
Mobile: 0481 009 501
Email: Isabelle.deSolier at vu.edu.au<mailto:Isabelle.deSolier at vu.edu.au>
Web: http://www.vu.edu.au/contact-us/isabelle-de-solier

Author of Food and the Self: http://www.bloomsbury.com/au/food-and-the-self-9780857854223/
Editor of Food Cultures: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/issue/view/150





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