ICED21 will continue: Here’s how we’re planning it

The ICED conference is the Design Society’s flagship conference series and has great importance to our research community. With this message, we would like to inform you of the steps we are taking to ensure that ICED will continue to serve as one of the leading conferences in our field, also in 2021, and our commitment to provide a safe venue for us all to publish and to share high-quality design research results. The following is our pledge to you:

• Firstly, let us assure you that ICED21 will take place! Both the Design Society Board of Management and the ICED21 Organising Committee, headed by Chalmers University of Technology, are committed to organising and running the ICED21 conference, in a form that is appropriate for the restrictions and precautions from the current pandemic.
• The Design Society assures you that regardless of their presentation form at the conference, article contributions will be processed, double-blind reviewed, published, and later charted in Scopus and WoS, via our publishing partner, Cambridge University Press.
• The Organising Committee, led by Chalmers, is preparing a conference with three contingency models: firstly, to welcome delegates to Gothenburg in safe, responsibly spaced facilities; secondly to prepare a professional online venue for the conference, for those who chose not to attend physically; and thirdly to prepare a fully-online experience, in the case that physical meetings are out of the question when we review our options. We have been actively participating (and continue to do so) in a number of online and hybrid events (both as attendees and organisers) and are learning a great deal about how to make an engaging and exciting experience for all of our Design Society members and other guests.
• The conference will be based on an on-line platform. As an ICED delegate you will have full access to the conference on-line platform. We also plan to offer on-site attendance at a later time as an “add-on” offer with an additional program.
• Pricing for conference participation will vary according to the form we can offer and the form that you as a participant may choose. We trust that you understand that such a variable pricing model is quite a new situation for us, so please be patient! We will, of course, have such pricing ready for early March 2021, when we will announce the participation options.
• We will keep the ICED website updated, so keep visiting this for news about the conference: iced.designsociety.org.

Do not hesitate to make contact to the ICED21 Organising Committee (iced@designsociety.org) or the Design Society Board of Management (admin@designsociety.org), if you have input or questions for us, regarding ICED21.

We look forward to meeting you all at the 23rd ICED conference in August 2021!

Kind regards

Tim McAloone (DS President) and Ola Isaksson (ICED21 Conference Chair)