AIS Design / Storia e Ricerche - design history journal (July 2019)

Website: AIS Design
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 July 2019

Theme: Social Design. Design and the "common good".

This call dedicated to social design, in its most various forms (product, service, communication and theory), therefore intends to collect contributions with a historical-critical viewpoint that highlight:

• Which were the most discussed design fields and projects concerning "common good” in Italy;
• What kind of relationships had the Italian projects in the international arena;
• Which cases can be considered as founding acts of contemporary social design;
• The possibility of defining historiographies and geographies of social design at an Italian and/or international level;
• The actual existence, or not, of a "public utility graphic design" and of its legacy;
• Which design practices are historically ascribable to the fields of reflection, research and experimentation and which ones had a practical impact on policies and production;
• Testimonies, contributions, debates which can be defined as the foundations of social design.

All submissions (both by invitation and in response to the call) are subject to blind peer-review.

Deadlines are as follows:

 July 15, 2019: abstract submission; contribution proposal must be based on the types

accepted (max. 300 words); it will include the title, 5 keywords and a short biography of the author/authors (max. 150 words each).The abstract may be in English (or English and Italian).

July 29, 2019: communication of interest by the editors.

September 20, 2019: full paper submission, adhering to the journal’s editorial standards and including abstract, keywords, author/s biography/ies, images, and captions (see below “Types of contributions and preparation of the materials); the contributions will be subject to peer review.

October 28, 2019: notification to the authors of the peer review's outcome (changes or additional work may be needed in view of publication).

November 18, 2019: final paper, sent by the authors of the final version of the contributions for publication.

All submissions should be submitted respecting the defined deadlines via email to editors@aisdesign.org and journal@aisdesign.org.

For questions and relevant communication contact the editors at editors@aisdesign.org.

TYPES of CONTRIBUTIONS and MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION

All proposed contributions must be original texts. Papers that are beyond the scope of the journal,

that have previously been submitted to other journals or have already been featured (in any

language), or that replicate texts published elsewhere, will be rejected without peer review.

Italian or english texts are accepted.

All proposed contributions must be original texts. Papers that are beyond the scope of the journal and have previously been submitted to other journals or already been featured (in any language), or that replicate texts published elsewhere will be rejected without peer review.

Final papers must be accompanied by:

- an abstract (max 150 words or 1000 characters) in Italian and English (regardless of whether the text is in Italian or English);

- a maximum of 5 keywords, in Italian and English;

- a short biography (max 150 words or 1000 characters), in Italian and English, of the author (or authors).

The journal's Director, Editors and Editorial Staff invite the authors to send proposals also in less conventional forms. Besides papers and essays of scientific quality, the journal accepts proposals that adopt various research and output methods.

It is considered essential to reinforce a proper oral history approach, with interviews with main or minor protagonists for framing some of the topics of the call in a specific perspective; or the critical dialogue with a protagonist of specific design experience or theoretical position. These contributions can be returned either in written form or in a video (movie) format.

Furthermore, visual contributions are accepted, in the form of visual essays: so to discuss the results of a story, its critical interpretation, or a particular point of view, in a visual-photographic form. A visual essay is essentially a sequence of ordered and organised photographs to construct a critical comment on a defined topic. The visual elements of an essay of this type must be prevalent to develop a topic or clarify the ideas that are intended to be presented, rather than serving as an example, illustration or additional documentation to a concise accompanying text. The images may have been produced for the occasion by the author and/or come from collections, archives, or be the result of specific research.

Once the proposal has been accepted, the editors and the editors will agree with the author (or authors) on possible adaptations and modifications for the best output in the journal.

Contributions can be proposed for the following categories.

- Essay: contributions presenting a theoretical, critical, and methodological stance that offer an in-depth discussion or re-reading of broad historical arguments and questions (max. 8000 words, including notes, references, captions).

- Research study: papers based on studies conducted on primary sources and offering original historical insight into specific topics or stories (max. 8000 words, including notes, references, captions).

- Micro-history: papers that analyse particular and specific stories, which have been neglected to date or refer to the border areas of the discipline (max. 4000 words, including notes, references, captions).

- We also accept reviews, translations, re-readings, in-depth studies on research and conservation institutions (from 1 to 4 per issue), as long as they are consistent with the topics of the call (max. 2000 words including notes, references and captions).

- As already underlined, the journal looks for contributions that use various research and output methods, for example interviews, critical dialogues, historiographical articles (max. 4000 words including notes, references and captions).

- Visual essay: the editors will evaluate contributions consisting of at least 15-20 images accompanied by 1500 words of text plus captions if necessary (this quantity corresponds conventionally to a text of 4000 characters or 600 words circa). It is possible to propose a visual essay as a single document containing images, text and captions following the editorial rules provided for the other types of contributions. Furthermore, upon acceptance, the author (or authors) must provide the images in adequate quality and resolution in separate files.

- Video (short documentary, video-interview) up to 30 minutes. Production, optimization and adaptation to online use are the responsibility of the authors. 

Style and preparation guidelines are available in Italian and English.

To complement their contribution, authors can submit up to 10 images (copyright-free images or images for which authors have obtained the right/permission of publication), accompanied by full captions (including credits).