Our Super Excellent Scenarios & Impacts paper (paper)

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It's been a standing joke between us four authors for a long time - referring to our not-yet-published paper as our "New and Super Excellent Scenarios & Impacts paper".

We are here talking about a paper that is based on a research project ("Scenarios and impacts of the information society") that ended quite some time ago (for example see this blog post from the beginning of 2015 or this blog post from February 2013). It's also the case that this is a rewritten version of a paper that has already been submitted once (back in April 2016!), but that was rejected by the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change. So we have now rewritten the paper and are submitting it to another journal in the hope that we will have better luck this time around.

There is another related article that has been on a parallell track. It concerns more or less the same results from the very same project but aimed towards "my" area, Human-Computer Interaction and has a quite different take on these research results. Another difference is that I'm first author (= workhorse) of that article. We submitted that article to NordiCHI 2016 (to the "Future Scenarios" track) back in May 2016 but it was rejected. We then rewrote it and resubmitted it to CHI 2017 in September 2016 and it was later accepted (in December 2016) and presented by me in Denver in May 2017.

I have a distinct feeling that the HCI article (where I was the first author) muscled itself in and took over a meeting when we were supposed to discuss the article we have now finally resubmitted. But it's also true that it has taken more than a year to finish rewriting this paper (i.e. it could have been resubmitted a year ago had we pursued that goal a bit more aggressively). I also have a distinct feeling I personally should have put more work into helping out and working with the text etc., but this alas seems to be the article that has recurrently slipped between the finger of all the four co-authors.

Anyway, I'm glad it was resubmitted ten days ago and I will write a non-anonymous blog post about the article as soon as it (hopefully) gets accepted!

Here's first author Ulrika's cover letter to the journal:

Dear editor,

Here comes a paper titled “[XXX]” written by myself and three colleagues. The paper has not been published elsewhere, but we have written about the same research project in the Proceeding of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Pages 773-785 (https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3025858). There the focus was on what HCI and design fiction can learn from Futures Studies in general and from this project in particular. In the paper we submit to [the journal XXX], the focus is on presenting five ICT scenarios, how we developed them and what can be learnt from them in terms of how different actors can make use of them, how their sustainability content can be assessed, and ICT as ideology. Thus, it’s not the same paper as in the proceedings from the CHI conference.

Best,

Ulrika Gunnarsson-Östling (corresponding author)
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