Creative Methods and Tools for Multimodal Technologies

Dear Colleague,

This Special Issue aims to take stock of creative methods and tools for multimodal technologies, to assess their nature, value, and significance in a range of research and design contexts, and to look to their future. By creative methods, we mean arts/design-based and innovative forms of making and expression that help to represent, explore, and understand bodily-sensorial experience as well as meaning making through interaction. These might involve and extend audiovisual or literary forms, crafts, and performance. Although often working under different premises, they share many commonalities with, and indeed sometimes double up as, tools for the design of multimodal technologies—technologies that engage multiple senses beyond audiovisual. In the context of design processes, creative methods find parallels in such tools as rapid prototyping, mapping, design fictions, gaming, and cultural probes. 

Creative methods have a long history across social sciences, media studies, HCI, and design, often favouring interdisciplinary collaboration to evoke new ways of thinking and feeling, to reframe problems, embrace serendipity and improvisation, and make room for the unexpected. They have, over the last three decades or so, accompanied and complemented an increased focus on the body and the senses as sites for research into lived experience and social interaction. Their very position at the intersection of disciplines and in contexts of rapid technological innovation means that their trajectories can be difficult to trace and critically evaluate. 

This Special Issue invites researchers and designers to submit original articles which apply creative methods and/or tools in the context of empirical research on—or the design process of—multimodal technologies. It asks: How are creative methods and tools being brought to the development of multimodal technologies? What emphasis do these approaches place on, or beyond, individual senses and modes (touch, smell, vision, sound, taste) and their interaction? How do they engage with the body and wider sensorium in relation to the technologies they seek to understand and advance? What forms of knowledge do they produce and, critically, (why) does this matter?

The call is open to submissions that focus on creative and innovate approaches within a broad range of digital technologies (e.g., biosensing, haptics, interactive skin, robotics, VR and augmented environments, affective technologies), which actively seek to engage with the body and senses in novel ways beyond audiovisual (e.g., haptic, olfactory, gustatory, kinaesthetic). Creative methods and/or tools can be brought to a range of topics, including but not limited to:

• Research focusing on the bodily-sensorial experience, interactional contexts, or design of multimodal technologies;
• Design processes for multimodal technologies;
• Studies that transcend boundaries between creative research methods and design tools;  
• Cross-context or multi-sited research and design;
• Studies which have explored or refined creative approaches over time;
• Arts-inspired research methods, including audiovisual, literary, performance- or crafts-based forms of expression and representation (e.g., video, photography, painting, crafts, poetry, choreography/dance, re-enactments, installations);
• Design-led methods and creative resources for design (e.g., design fiction, mapping, cultural and disruptive probes, rapid prototyping, digital prompts, card-based tools, gaming).

Dr. Kerstin Leder Mackley
Dr. Ned Barker
Prof. Dr. Sara Price
Prof. Dr. Carey Jewitt
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.