The research team of the Virtual Worlds Research project at Roskilde University is excited to announce a 3-day cross disciplinary research workshop entitled ‘Making Sense of Virtual Worlds and User Driven Innovation”, June 7th-9th 2010 in Denmark. We aim to bring together researchers with high-end expertise in research on virtual worlds to share distinctive theoretical and empirical analyses of virtual worlds as spaces for sense-making and as sites for user-driven innovation. We will pay special attention to creating a program and atmosphere that promotes joint explorations, interactions and exchange of ideas among invited participants.
The key challenge of the workshop is to jointly explore meaning-making, sense-making processes and user-driven innovation in and/or about virtual worlds through particular case studies of empirical field(s) such as: new market dynamics and management, (and/or) social and cultural innovation, (and/or) knowledge construction. Some of the research questions we will seek to address are:
• How have actors (private, public and academic) appropriated this collection of new media and technologies?
• In what situations do actors of these empirical fields find that it is meaningful to design and use virtual worlds and thereby facilitate innovate practices?
• How are the specific affordances and challenges of working in and with virtual worlds dealt with in practice?
• Through the use of what forms of communication, design and practices do actors of these empirical fields bridge experienced problems and thereby innovate existing and/or develop new practices?
• What particular analytical concepts and theories can facilitate our understanding of virtual world processes of co-design, re-design and user-driven content creation and innovation?
On a conceptual plane, the workshop then aims to explore the ways in which ’sense-making’ and ‘user-driven innovation’ interrelate and how these interconnected processes can be conceptualized and theorized across different situations and cases.
