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.
The 2009 event is hosted by Trinity College Dublin and it was organised by Aaron Quigley and Gavin Doherty. The first day was dedicated to workshops and tutorials.
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.
Henry Poskitt and Frank Long from Frontend spoke about OOBE (oh, how I recognised myself in the picture of the frustrated user!) and working with personas in design.
The talk of Des Traynor (Contrast) focused on designing for mobile context and made our imagination fly by talking about e-ink and application integration!
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!
September 17 2009 | Events and Ireland and conferences and iHCI | No Comments »
My department organised a great event yesterday - the first Irish Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. About 50 people from different universities, companies and public institutions attended the event, which turned out to be a success! Several research groups from Cork, Dublin, Galway , Limerick and Maynooth presented their current research and projects, and I must say it was very interesting to find what was going on - not only in the other universities, but also in our own!
I found a lot of interesting connections in the presentations of Tim Hall (EMRC), Mark Magennis(NCBI) , Aphra Kerr(NUIM - NIRSA).
Mark Leslie(Martello Media) presented three of their projects, and the “fun palace” designed for the Visitor Centre at the Cliffs of Moher really caught my attention. I’m as mad as everyone else for the horrible impact that building had on the environment, but I’d still like to see what came out!
The ScanCam one of the participants was wearing at his neck raised privacy concerns (taking shots at every change detected in the environment- 5000-7000 pics/day). Our colleague introduced an interesting application that was actually trying to make sense of these images by selecting the less frequent situations out of the huge pile.
I was fascinated by the story around the design of a digital piece of jewelry presented by John Mc’Carthy from UCC. Different interactive artefacts made me think of the wide spectrum of opportunities for augmenting human intelligence made possible by technology: the topographic torch, the touch table, the search of digital archives, or artistic events such as the re-creation of the 1831 riot in the Queen Square in Bristol.
I also had the chance to discover that one of our colleagues in TCD is actually studying meetings and the electronic support for meetings (unlike us, who are focusing on software engineering, he’s looking at the medical domain).
The breaks allowed for a lot of networking, and the gorgeous weather brought us outside, in the nice ambiance of the Kilmurry village.
In the afternoon, we had a group discussion on possible future actions for keeping in touch, creating awareness mechanisms on each other’s work, and becoming more visible in Ireland as a community. The ideas kept buzzing, and we put together a wiki page to keep track of what was said and remains to be put into practice.
A few other people blogged the event: Mike Bennett, Eoin Brazil.
And of course we had a short note (and some comments!) on the IDC blog as well!
Although several people were involved in the organization, my colleague Luigina Ciolfi was the heart and the force behind this event. Kudos, Lui, for all the hard work! I enjoyed every minute, and judging by what I’ve heard, so did most of the participants!
May 03 2007 | IDC and Ireland and Limerick and conference and iHCI | 1 Comment »
