authors |
Yessios, Chris I. (Ed.) |
year |
1989 |
title |
New Ideas and Directions for the 1990’s [Conference Proceedings] |
doi |
https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.acadia.1989
|
source |
ACADIA Conference Proceedings / Gainsville (Florida - USA) 27-29 October 1989, 262 p. |
summary |
About a year ago, a comment of mine to Bob Johnson that recent Acadia Conferences appeared to be bypassing some of the real issues of CAAD and that the attendants seemed to be missing the opportunity to debate and to argue, landed me a request to be the Technical Chair for this Acadia 89. In spite of an expected heavy load this past year, I could not refuse. I certainly did not realize at the time what it would take to put the technical program of this Conference together: two "calls" for papers, many- many phone calls and the gracious acceptance of three invited speakers and twelve panelists. In response to a recommendation by Pamela Bancroft, last year's Technical Chair, the first call for papers had a deadline which was by about a month earlier than it has been in recent years. This must have found our membership unprepared and generated only thirteen submissions. A second call was issued with the end of July as a deadline. It generated another eleven submissions. Out of that total of twenty-four papers, ten were selected and are presented in this Conference. The selection process was based strictly on averaging the grades given by each of the three referees who blindly reviewed each paper. The names of the reviewers have been listed earlier in this volume and I wish to take this opportunity to wholeheartedly thank them. In most cases the reviewers offered extensive comments which were returned to the authors and helped them improve their papers. Many of the papers have actually been rewritten in response to the reviewers' comments and what are included in these Proceedings are substantially improved versions of the papers originally submitted. This is the way it is supposed to be, but could not be done without the excellent response by the authors. I"hey deserve our sincere thanks. It must be noted that the reviewers were not always in agreement, which should tell us something about the diverse orientations of our members. In the case of at least three papers, one reviewer gave a 0 or 1 (very low) when another gave a 9 or 10 (very high). In these cases the third reviewer gave the deciding grade. In no case was there a need for me to break a tie. Under normal circumstances, these "controversial" papers should have gone out for another cycle of reviews. Time did not permit to do so. However, I feel confident that the papers which have been selected deserve to be heard. It may be worth speculating why it took two calls to generate only 24 submissions when last year we had 42. There are a number of factors which must have had an effect. First of all, the early deadline. Secondly, the theme of this year's Conference was more focussed than it has been in the recent past. In addition, it was quite challenging. Even though the calls also encouraged submissions in areas other than the central theme, they discouraged contributions which might be redundant with past presentations. This must have filtered out presentations about "CAD in the studio" which did not have an orientation distinctively different from what everybody else is doing. Last, but possibly the most decisive factor must have been that, this year, Acadia was in competition with the Futures Conference. It does not take much to observe that more than half of the presentations at the CAAD Futures Conference were given by active Acadia members. Acadia should by all means be delighted that the bi-annual Futures took place in the States this year, but it certainly made our organizational task harder. As a matter of fact, as a record of CAAD happenings in 1989, 1 believe the Proceedings of the two Conferences complement each other and should be read as a pair. |
series |
ACADIA |
email |
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more |
http://www.acadia.org |
references |
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last changed |
2022/06/07 07:49 |
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