miLKlabs and IxDA Limerick are joining forces to organise the first Ignite talk series ever in our city!The event will happen on Wednesday, April 6 2011, 7 pm in the Absolute Hotel.
Why this event?
The idea is to spread the news about miLKlabs, bring together likeminded individuals, create synergies between people from different backgrounds and highlight possible collaborations. We are also trying to shed a light on the creativity and talent of Limerick people and bringing them to the attention of the public. IxDA Limerick is hosting the event as part of their United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development programme.
What is Ignite?
In talks that are exactly five minutes long, Ignite presenters share their personal and professional passions, using 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. Ignite events are run by local volunteers in many locations around the world, as part of the global Ignite network. Talks are video recorded and shared on the Internet, allowing local Ignites to share the knowledge and passion with the world (more about Ignite here ).
What is miLKlabs?
miLKlabs is a collaborative community space based in Limerick City, Ireland. The name is derived from ‘made in LimericK’. It is meant as a shared physical space for any and all creative projects: art, woodwork, software, photography and electronics – to name but a few. The aim is to provide Limerick with a place for people to work and collaborate on creative projects, to learn and to share their knowledge.
What is IxDA Limerick?
IxDA Limerick is the local chapter of the Interaction Design Association, a global network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design.
If you have an interesting idea or project you’d like to talk about, there’s still room for speakers! Please drop us an email at ignitelimerick@gmail.com with your name and a title for your talk.
There are many days when I feel proud to be part of various groups of people that work on things that matter. And today was one of them.
It started with the Limerick OpenCoffee in the morning. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish by having coffee with like minded people once a month! Talking about a possible home for the MiLK Labs and the many things that could happen once we find it with James, planning joint events for our students with Bernie, exploring social graphs and couchsurfing, adding events to my diary and meeting new people.
And it ended at the university, in the Concert Hall, where I went for this month’sICO concert. We are so lucky to have this world class orchestra in our vicinity and to listen to them every month!
Tonight, after the interval, this little video was shown, and Kathleen Turner, the ICO education officer explained how part of the money we pay for tickets goes to support initiatives like Sing Out with Strings:
I felt proud. My finances are not at their best these days, but this is a really worthy cause. Music can bridge many differences and transform people!
At the end of the video, the signature of Shannon Images brought back nice memories from Padraic O’Reilly’s talk at 3Dcamp back in 2008.
Life is good. And I am a very fortunate human being to live around so many people who work on things that matter – to them and to me!
Last year, I had my conference ticket and booked my flight, but I was appointed on a PhD examination committee and couldn’t go. I tried every possible solution to go over even for one day, but it didn’t work out in the end.
I am absolutely thrilled! And I am so grateful to those who recommended me for the job – I will finally get to meet the members of this vibrant community!
The pre-conference day (Oct 26) has two workshops scheduled:
From Social Messaging to Social Sharing, lead by Joachim Lindner, and
How to Establish a Social Networking Culture, lead by Jenny Ambrozek.
They both sound extremely interesting – it is so important to understand that social media tools can’t work on their own! The right culture has to be in place for people to adopt and use them before any benefit can be realised!
My intention was to give a presentation about FabLabs at 3Dcamp. But being in the middle of 1000 other things, I postponed putting my name forward until no slot was left unoccupied. Well, I guess you don’t need to hear me talking – you can read it by yourselves.
FabLab (or Fabrication Laboratory) is a concept originating at MIT as part of the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). If you’re looking for a short explanation, it is the realistic version of the Star Trek replicator.
The whole idea is about sharing designs globally, while making things locally.
There are 41 FabLabs around in the world at the moment, in US as well as in Norway, Germany, the Netherlands in Europe, in Afghanistan and in rural India. The concept seems to have captured the imagination of many, and inventors, artists, teachers and students can get access to top technology to experiment making things without too much need for training.
Will the day come when we’ll produce all we need in our own kitchen? The plates, the mugs, the tea towels, but also the washing machine and the family car? Will the day come when machines will be able to replicate themselves?
On Wednesday, Nicholas Polley, the founder of the Dublin-based company 3rd Dimension was our guest in the IDC. He was invited to give a talk for our students and staff, continuing the Interaction Design Talks series we initiated in autumn (previous speakers were Nicola Quinn and Macdara Butler).
3rd Dimension’s Visualisation and Animation studios are based in Blackrock in Co Dublin. The company is focused on creating design solutions that include 3D visuals, photomontages, visual impact assessments and 3D walkthroughs meant to support their clients planning and marketing strategies.
I met Nick last year at the InnovateMedia 09 event, and approached him to talk about 3dcamp. Nick was open to the idea of coming to give a talk in UL, and we’re glad we managed to organise it.
The talk, titled Inside 3D Visualisation, attracted a pretty large crowd from both our undergrad and postgrad courses: Digital Media Design, Product Design and Interactive Media.
Nick spoke about his own career, about his company’s past and ongoing projects and referred to the processes and technologies involved. I think it was a great opportunity for our students not only to find out about technologies and work processes, but also about how to get a job in the digital media industry. Nick emphasized the importance of portfolios in selecting appropriate job candidates – and gave me yet another argument to push our students to start the work on their portfolios as early as possible!
On the same evening, Nick was the guest speaker at the IxDA Limerick meetup in the Absolute Hotel.
In the medical domain, 3rdDimension are doing interesting things in representing the eye, its conditions and interventions to correct this, in collaboration with a Swiss ophtalmologist.
A discussion started around VirtuSphere and its potential use for walkthroughs in to-be-built spaces. It was compared to CAVE – after the InnovateMedia 09 event, both myself and Nick had the chance to visit the CAVE installation owned by IADT. I expressed doubts that bringing people to visit an installation would be as successful as the wide spread visualizations that can be made accessible to anyone, anywhere
Nick blogged about his visit as well. It was great to have him in Limerick and I hope we can convince him to speak at the next 3d camp!
The series of iHCI conferences started two years ago – my colleague Luigina Ciolfi organised the 2007 event, hosted by the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick.
I chose to attend the IxDA industry talks this morning – and I was really impressed by the great speakers line-up! Kudos to Ben Arent for the organisation and for telling us more about the IxDA Dublin and the upcoming Design Week!
Niamh Phelan (IQ Content) spoke about Google Analytics and how to harness its power when researching usability matters. She pointed the audience to the IQContent blog for useful tips on tracking multiple domains and I was really impressed by their openness to share useful solutions.
I enjoyed the morning session a lot and I’ll do my best to convince these fantastic guys to come to Limerick and talk to the students in the near future.
The afternoon was dedicated to a tutorial on Inclusive Design for Older and Disabled Users offered by Prof.Helen Petrie from the University of York, UK. The tutorial was a real mind opener on what it means to design for and with people with various disabilities. The conclusion was that even if the needs of these groups might be very diverse, the solutions are not that diverse, and by including these concerns in the design process from the very beginning, mainstream technologies (and not only the assistive ones) could benefit a lot. Prof. Petrie mentioned quite a lot the Utopia project and the work of Alan Newell from Dundee University who is using theatre as an intermediary between users and designers.
The workshop included a practical exercise that required us to wear 3 pairs of latex gloves and glasses exemplifying various sight disabilities while trying to perform a simple task on a phone or laptop that didn’t belong to us. Here I am wearing the glasses:) (thanks to @aquigley!)
The first day ended with a social event at the Bagott Inn. More about iHCI tomorrow!
At ECSCW’07, I was running a workshop on GSD and couldn’t attend the one organised by Michael Koch and Wolfgang Prinz on Web 2.0. As this workshop took place next door from ours, I couldn’t avoid noticing the enthusiasm and the fun the participants had.
The organisers put together a wiki page and a blog was created to allow the participants to publish their own position papers and to get acquainted to the others’.
The workshop was structured in two parts: the morning was dedicated to the applications of web 2.0 tools in education, while in the afternoon we spoke about the applications of the same tools in research.
During the morning session, I was scheduled to fill the first slot. I had prepared slides, but it seemed to me that things were very relaxed and I decided to speak from my place instead, with no visuals. All I had to share were stories about tools I’ve used in both education and research, their adoption(or rejection!) by various groups, the feedback I got and what I’ve learned from these. My position paper can be accessed here. The discussion flew from there – there were a lot of interesting contributions, stories and solutions shared. Here are some of the things we spoke about:
different student groups have different needs – one size doesn’t fit all!
the use of social media tools almost always generate more work for the students, and more work for the teachers as well. But:
most of the students love the feeling of having created content that becomes public and can be seen as a meaningful contribution;
the first cohort of students using a specific tool seem to have the hardest time; once examples are out there, and a precedent was created, things seem to work better.
the introduction of social media tools tends to add more problems, as these tools are brought in to support an old paradigm.
the use of social media tools is challenging academics and students to update their own teaching/learning style.
A number of interesting questions came up – here are just a few of the ones I jotted down:
do students like social media tools?
do social media tools really support learning?
do these tools make learning more attractive?
are teaching institutions interested in supporting this adoption?
what is the impact of social media adoption on the position of the teacher? Is he still the expert, or his role is shifting more toward facilitating knowledge sharing?
The afternoon was dedicated to social software applications in research: e-science, research collaboratories. I heard a lot of interesting things about various communities using web 2.0 tools, and also about various initiatives and projects meant to facilitate collaboration at distance, serendipity and open sharing.
On Wednesday evening, I took my daughter to the O2 to see Leonard Cohen. Other mothers (in the movies) might make more expensive gifts to their daughters at graduation, like a car, or a shopping trip to NY, but I’m not in that position…so this seemed to me the perfect gift, that none of us will ever forget!
It was a fantastic night – words cannot describe the atmosphere in the O2! Cohen is a great singer, poet and human being – his generosity and spirit were overwhelming.
I remember very well that the first time I heard him singing (on a tape) – it was on New Year’s Eve ’76, and the song was Suzanne. One of our friends had emmigrated with his family to Germany, and now he was back for Christmas holidays, and he brought this tape with him. For days, “Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water” kept on playing in my head.
And then nothing, for years and years. Censorship never allowed Cohen songs to be played on the radio in Romania before 1989.
In 1998, on a trip to Germany, I bought my first Cohen CD.
I never imagined I’m going to see him live, although last year when he played in Dublin I made an attempt. The only other famous person I’ve seen live was Billy Joel in Croke Park in 2006. And it was a major disappointment – the way he treated the audience was simply outrageous. Maybe it was part of the show-his show. Cohen was a completely different experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
There were many astonishing moments – but one of the highlights was definitely “So long, Marianne”. Here’s a recording someone made on Sunday night:
He sang most of his famous songs. He recited “A thousand kisses deep“. He sang a few songs I’ve never heard before as well. He spoiled us with solos of the members of his band. He was on his knees in front of us very often, but he also danced like a young man.
It was a great night that none of us will easily forget!
Every now and then, Lero- The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre organises industry days, where researchers talk about their work with Irish practitioners. The one we had today happened in Dublin, and was hosted by Enterprise Ireland in its East Point premises in Dublin. It was organised in connection with the conference we are hosting this summer at UL – the International Conference on Global Software Engineering, for which I happen to be the local organisation chair.
(Photos by Jack Downey, the Lero Industry officer whose organisation efforts made the event possible.)
The event included 3 talks and time for networking and discussions; there were approx 30 attendees.The detailed programme can be found here.
Dr.Ita Richardson spoke about the need for extending standards like CMMI and ISO15504 to include guidelines for Global Software Development and regulated industries such as medical devices.
My talk was a reflection on the role of collaborative practices such as informal communication, socialisation and cultural mediation. I introduced the socGSD project. I spoke a bit about my field sites and the use of ethnographic methods. I shared with the audience a number of stories on things as banal as using instant messaging, Skype and social networking applications in day-to-day collaboration between distributed team members. No matter how banal they look like, a lot of managers don’t seem to understand yet their role as the glue that brings people together and allows them to create rapport. I concluded with a few recommendations, emphasizing the role of direct and frequent communication between sites, flexibility in organisational practices and cultural mediation. I got very positive feedback after the talk – several participants came to me to tell me how they resonated with the things I spoke about.
The third speaker was Vikas Sahni of Softedge Systems and it was great to hear from a practitioner how some of the things I touched upon in my talk were seen from the other side. One point where Vikas disagreed with me was cultural mediation and the role of people who can bridge different cultures. He gave the example of an Indian project manager based in Ireland who had difficulties in syncronising with his developers in India, while an Irish project manager was getting excellent results with an Indian team. In my view, this proves the danger of generalisation and of talking about “good practices”.
What works in one case can fail in another, because software is developed by people, and most problems are not connected to technology, but to people, to paraphrase Tom DeMarco. Not everyone can be a cultural mediator – it is a matter of people skills and personality. Next week, my colleague Alexander Boden will present our joint paper and poster on the topic of cultural mediation at the CHASE workshop collocated with ICSE’09 in Vancouver.
It was a wonderful sunny day, so after contemplating the idea of seeing the Bodies exhibition, I followed an impulse I had since the day I first arrived in Dublin – to get on an open bus and do the tourist tour.
I hoped off in Stephen’s Green and sat on the grass for a while, and then hopped back on. I was planning to see a film at the IFI, but because the bus got stuck in traffic, I got off in Heuston and returned to Limerick.
Thanks to Twitter again and to the serendipity it creates, I came across a talk titled “Fake Ethnography vs. Real Ethnography” by Aviva Rosenstein from the User Research Friday held in San Francisco last November.
And James Kalbach did a great job summarising it on his blog!
This is an ongoing debate: do researchers from other domains than anthropology really do ethnography? Or we should only speak about “using ethnographic methods”?
In our project, even if we did field studies during extended periods of time, we preferred to state that we used “ethnographically-informed” methods. Anyhow, Rosenstein makesthe point in the conclusion of her talk: if you are stating your possible bias, you are collecting data (instead of recording assumptions), you’re treating your informants well and you’re also observing what they actually do without relying entirely on what they say they do, if you are trying to understand things at a deeper level, look for patterns and write the whole thing down, you are doing decent research employing ethnographic methods. In the end, the measure of success is delivering some value to the organisation you’re working with!
I loved the advice she gave to researchers : mix and match, be creative and resourceful bricoleurs, make mistakes and tell the others about them, and… be brave!
The talk rang a big bell to me – it is so difficult to walk on this narrow path when there’s criticism everywhere, and so good to hear some words of encouragement!
“Here’s a clever way to do a conference: make it short (four hours), make it entertaining (fast, opinionated presentations), do it in a bar. User Research Friday, hosted by Bolt Peters in SF, has used this formula to great effect a couple of times so far, most recently on November 7, when six speakers in the design research field kept 140 of their colleagues spellbound, then stuck around for drinks.”
Really – an interesting idea!
I tried to retrieve the tweets from the event – there’s a twitter feed on the screen during the final sequences of the video, and Bolt | Peters mentions #URF08 as hashtag, but summize doesn’t seem to find anything. An application for extracting and archiving event Twitter feeds anyone?!
