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.

The talk touched on various uses of 3D visualization for Building Information Modelling, virtual decorators, real-time 3D, a new plugin allowing to add 3D representations and walkthroughs to Skype conversations.

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 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!

For the current edition- ECSCW’09 in Vienna, Michael Koch and Isa Jahnke proposed the workshop Academia 2.0 and beyond – How Social Software changes research and education in academia, and it was one of the workshops that generated a lot of interest.

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!

I had to look the expression up on the Internet. Me - living a life of a king? I was ready to react in the “poor me” style! But then I realised that in a way, it was absolutely true… I wasn’t completely free, because I still have a few duties connecting me to the university - the biggest being the conference I’ve been working on organising for almost a year now, but still… no stringent plans for the future.

I’m at the crossroads - my contract as a lecturer came to an end in March. I got work until June, with the  perspective of a lecturing job that was going to be advertised during that period. But we’re in recession times - a recruitement embargo was set on all public institutions in Ireland, and the hiring process was blocked. So I guess the university gates closed for me - although some people claim there’s still hope.

For the first time in 28 years, I found myself unemployed. It was difficult to accept in the beginning - any kinds of jobs are scarce right now, but I tried to accept this lesson and find some good parts in it. I have accumulated so much during the last four years, that maybe it is time to sit down and digest. In the trepidation of academic life, deadlines are hitting you like trains, often coming from unexpected directions - so sometimes you don’t even have the time to get back on your feet, that a new task hits you and needs to be fitted in somehow.

OK. So I signed up for the dole on Tuesday. I was told I will feel ashamed and miserable. I don’t. I have worked for 28 years and I paid taxes all this time. I want to work, but wasn’t able to find something else, because I was too busy … working! For free. I’m a real addict, ain’t I?!

People ask me if I will leave Ireland, because jobs might be available elsewhere. No, I’m not planning to leave. I have the feeling that my place is here. I fit in. I am happy here. I have no complaints about the weather;) More than anything else, I love the people. And I believe there’s a future for me here.

What will I do? I don’t know yet. Knowledge management, distributed software development, social media, user studies, online facilitation, cultural mediation - I can wear many hats, and I have served many masters. Maybe I’ll have to go on my own - although I’m scared to death right now by this idea of total independence.

I am still involved in paper writing, I am the co-editor of a special issue of IST, and so on, and so forth. Does it make sense to keep working on these if they don’t mean a thing when it comes to employability? I don’t know. All I know is that my heart is still there, no matter how hard writing seems at times. And that I have a whole lot of goodies in my bag that I didn’t have the time to share until now.

So yes, I’m living the life of Reilly these days!

This is when I first heard about INNOV8 - “an interactive, 3-D business simulator designed to teach the fundamentals of business process management and bridge the gap in understanding between business leaders and IT teams in an organization.”

I invited Joanne Stanley from the Dublin IBM Innovation Centre to give a presentation on it at 3Dcamp, and I got a positive answer yesterday. Joanne wrote that if she can’t make it to Limerick, either her or Kevin Farrar, the IBM Academic Initiative Programme Leader for the UK and Ireland, will participate remotely and give a presentation on Innov8.

A short excerpt from the press release on the latest version of Innov8:

Building on the success of the original INNOV8 in the academic community, INNOV8 v.2 will be available at no cost to businesses and academic institutions for simulations and training. The new version features puzzles and tasks that challenge players to tackle real-world challenges. INNOV8 v.2 delivers a complete redesign of the game, with a new global collaboration feature for players to work with virtual teammates to progress to the next level of the game. In addition, three new game scenarios reflect a new level of intelligence required for future, high-value job opportunities:

• ‘Green’ Supply Chain: Players evaluate a traditional supply chain model and are tasked with reducing a fictional company’s carbon footprint.
• Efficient Traffic Flow: Players evaluate existing traffic patterns and re-route traffic based on sensors that alert the player to disruptions such as accidents and roadway congestion.
• Call Center Customer Service: Using a call center environment, players develop more efficient ways to respond to customers.

You can access here the Press release for 8.2. You can also check the developers’ blog, and follow them  on Twitter. They even have a page on Facebook!

(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.

Here’s the recording:

Fake Ethnography vs Real Ethnography Talk at URF08 from bolt peters on Vimeo.

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!

Carl Aviani also makes the following point:

“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?!

Update: Friendfeed does the trick!  This tweet of Josie Fraser gave me the idea to try!

We had quite a few of new attendees, and I tried to play the host. Don’t think I succeeded very well, because I was too nervous thinking of the 1000 different things I had to postpone doing for going there! But anyhow, after 10 min and 2 urgent mails sent, I managed to sink into the relaxed atmosphere…

This time we had two presentations on the agenda:

• Elaine Rogers from Seefin Coaching spoke about Time Management, and
• John Gleeson from the University of Limerick (UL) spoke about Technology Transfer.

I had my laptop with me, and instead of taking notes, I felt like twittering what was going on. Read from the bottom up if you want to make any sense of it!These are all the tweets under #LOCC during those hours!

The funny part was that Ger Hartnett read my tweet about Elaine’s slide with a list of time wasters, and asked if Twitter was on the list. I presented Elaine with the comment (in almost real time), and she confessed she avoided it on purpose… because herself spends a lot of time on Twitter.

1. elainerogers @gabig58 @schregardus thanks 4 comments. Really enjoyed giving the talk #LOCC about 17 hours ago from TwitterFon
2. gabig58 #LOCC Partner with researchers and research groups, make your skill sets known to UL, suggest interesting problems, tap into EI support about 19 hours ago from web
3. gabig58 #LOCC The EI High-potential start-up program - http://short.ie/chd073 about 19 hours ago from web
4. gabig58 #LOCC Successful UL Campus Companies: http://www.powervation.com/, http://www.stokesbio.com/, http://www.crescentds.com/ about 19 hours ago from web
5. gabig58 omg! 5 new followers in the last 20 min, just because I’m tweeting from #LOCC! Thank you! Hope my battery won’t fail me! about 19 hours ago from web
6. gabig58 #LOCC For companies looking for collaboration with universities,have a look at Innovation Vouchers and Innovation Partnerships(EI funded) about 19 hours ago from web
7. gabig58 #LOCC John Gleeson’s role at UL is to facilitate university - industry linkages and research commercialisation about 19 hours ago from web
8. gabig58 #LOCC A bit of history - the establishment of UL in 1972, a picture of the White House and one of the Living Bridge about 19 hours ago from web
9. gabig58 #LOCC John Gleeson from UL talking about Technology Transfer for the next 20 min. about 19 hours ago from web
10. gabig58 #LOCC @elainerogers Anecdote about a person changing her Facebook profile to check what ads would come up! about 19 hours ago from web
11. gabig58 #LOCC @elainerogers Try to fit your todo’s in one of the four quadrants: important/not important, urgent/not urgent about 19 hours ago from web
12. gabig58 #LOCC @elainerogers shares her personal planner layout. A wheel of life (http://short.ie/pft4kz) underneath helps her keep the balance. about 19 hours ago from web
13. gabig58 #LOCC Are you a Fireman? Over-Committer? Acquarian? Chatty Kathy? Perfectionist? Find out yourself! http://short.ie/o7gbov about 20 hours ago from web
14. gabig58 #LOCC if procrastination is taking up,and you spend your day on Twitter, FB,YouTube -your body is actually telling you it’s time for a break about 20 hours ago from web
15. gabig58 #LOCC The mayonese jar story:you can put the golf balls in,the pebbles and the sand -but there’s always space left for a cuppa with a friend about 20 hours ago from web
16. gabig58 #LOCC @ghartnett No trace of Twitter on @elainerogers time wasters list. She confessed she avoided it on purpose…she’s a Twitter addict;) about 20 hours ago from web
17. ghartnett @gabig58 Is Twitter on the list? #LOCC about 20 hours ago from TweetDeck
18. gabig58 #LOCC @elainerogers goes through a list of time wasters. Meetings very well represented;) about 20 hours ago from web
19. ghartnett @gabig58 @elainerogers talk sounds interesting. Sorry I’m missing it. #LOCC about 20 hours ago from TweetDeck
20. gabig58 #LOCC @elainerogers from Seefin just started her talk. A few attendees’ opinions on time management. Elaine “time management is a myth” about 20 hours ago from web

And my battery did fail me in the end!

I had the chance to play an Akoha Thank you! card with Ted Vickey, for his talk on LinkedIn at Bizcamp.

And then I ran home to finish my slides for the Lero Industry Day on Monday.

In the evening, I went to an event organised by the Limerick County Enterprise Board: a talk by Brody Sweeney, the man behind O’Briens Sandwich Bars, titled “The real way to start up and stay in business”. The talk was the most inspiring event I went to lately! Brody spoke with extreme honesty about the problem he faced along the way, the sometimes unorthodox approaches he had to take, and what really counts. What really counts are people and hard work - and this struck a chord in me! We’ve heard the same thing from Patrick Collison at the OpenCoffee almost a year ago - there’s really hard work behind any successful business!

And the message we all took home was that there’s an opportunity in every apparently bad thing that’s happening to us - and the current recession is no exception! So I’ll try to get up smiling tomorrow morning, start with my best foot and see the hidden opportunities behind all this apparent doom and gloom everybody seems to be whining about!