Call for Papers: Design Contributions for the COVID-19 Global Emergency, Special Issue of Strategic Design Research Journal

Design contributions for the COVID-19 global emergency

Guest editors: Emilio Rossi, Massimo Di Nicolantonio, Fabrizio Ceschin, Giuseppe Mincolelli, Aguinaldo dos Santos, Cindy Kohtala, Edu Jacques, Carla Cipolla, Ezio Manzini

The 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic disease (COVID-19), appeared for the first time in Wuhan (Hubei Province, China) in late 2019 and rapidly spread in the rest of the world since the early months of 2020, has produced a significant and sadly dramatic impact in the life of all people. To date (April 22^th, 2020), over 2.550.000 people have shown symptoms and over 175.000 died for health and respiratory problems. While the entire humanity feels dangerously powerless at the same time an unprecedented amount of initiatives across the world have shown human creativity and resilience. The entire scientific community is cohesive in facing this emergency and the severe health-related issues that have arisen in the last months.

In this unparalleled scenario, the global Design community is called to act. And it is doing it! The new instances pointed out by the global emergencies allow reflecting to the ways the Design discipline can answer to unprecedented phenomena, with the will to foresee likely solutions in the long run from the lesson that we can learn in these months. At the same time, it is possible to immediately underline all bottom-up and top-down reactions that formally and informally are arising as conscious designed actions to solve the COVID-19 both at the small scales and at the large ones.

There is a widespread perception that this worldwide crisis will change all aspects of our way of living and relating to each other. Governments, companies, NGOs, communities and individuals are already dedicating their time to reflect the future scenarios, devising solutions that can enable a transition to the new world that might come after the pandemic. Whilst contributing to the on-going challenges of the pandemic, the Design community can also contribute through its abductive reasoning, with propositions for new scenarios on the post-pandemic aftermath.

The aim of this Special Issue of the Strategic Design Research Journal is to enrich the cultural and scientific debate by gathering and mapping all progresses produced in the COVID-19 emergency scenario and, then, to understand the role of the Design discipline in facing the complex global emergencies.

Therefore, manuscripts developed for this Special Issue can include, but not limited to:

• Cases studies, design projects and experimental applications carried out in emergency-driven scenarios, and their contribution in facing the COVID-19-related difficulties, or indirectly generated from it.
• Phenomenological investigations of regional / local policies, and their impact at the international scale, including the scalability of trials in the way of sustainable and inclusive applications.
• Studies on socially inclusive and human centred solutions connecting communities, enabling technologies and societal needs after the emergency scenarios.
• Studies on the role of Design in distributed / greener economies during and after pandemics or crisis situations aimed to trace promising business models and competitive forms of sustainable wellbeing.
• Inductive studies using technology-led and design-driven approaches aimed to create more resilient and sustainable social forms of wellbeing.
• Interdisciplinary explorations and proactive design-led scenario studies concerning positive multidisciplinary impacts within the Discipline after the COVID-19 emergency.
• Theoretical / methodological studies on future research lines that the Design discipline may consider for the next decades, even taking into account the advances proposed within the Discipline in last years.
• Impact of COVID-19 in HE systems and strategies adopted to face education-related issues.

To help bring new insights into this topic, the Guest Editors welcome papers from researchers, designers and professionals working in all fields of Design, for review and possible publication in this forthcoming Special Issue of the Strategic Design Research Journal.

SUBMISSION

The manuscripts must be written in English and they must follow the APA style.

Authors are invited to submit full papers (NO MORE THAN 5000 WORDS including all text parts) responding to one of the topics described above.

All submissions are double blind peer reviewed, and accepted papers will be published in Vol.13 No.3 (September-December 2020).

Previously published articles will not be accepted. Submitted articles must not be under consideration for publication anywhere else. The publication of the article is subjected to the previous approval of the journal's Editorial Board, as well as to peer review made by, at least, two reviewers using the double blind review process.

Manuscripts must be sent through the journal’s online submission system. You have to register in the platform in order to submit your article: http://revistas.unisinos.br/sdrj.

Please contact the Editorial office for further details at: eduj@edu.unisinos.br and/or erossi@lincoln.ac.uk.

Before submitting, authors should consult the referencing, style and formatting information in the Instructions for Authors here: http://revistas.unisinos.br/index.php/sdrj/about/submissions#onlinesubmissions

TIMELINE

April 2020: Launch of the call for papers.

July 15^th July 29th, 2020: Full papers submission deadline for those selected to continue (no more than 5000 words including tables, references, figure captions, and endnotes). Please strictly follow the author guidelines: http://revistas.unisinos.br/index.php/sdrj/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

August 15^th, 2020:  Notification of accept / reject / revisions to authors.

September 1^st, 2020: Final manuscript submission deadline.

October 1^st, 2020: Publication of the special number.