CHI Monday

What a day.

After the opening plenary, I got to see the tail end of Shveta‘s talk on her capstone work last year, which was accepted as an experience report. One of the downsides to this particular convention center and the size of this particular conference is that the rooms can’t handle the ebb and flow of people. Shveta’s talk started a little early, and I had to wait in line until enough people exited for me to be able to enter. A number of other IU people had the same problem. She saw us at the end and waved.

My second session was all about the SV. The one task I wanted to do more than any other was the lone blogging assignment to cover an interactive session that included Bill Buxton (Microsoft Research), Terry Winograd (Stanford University), Meg Armstrong (Parsons The New School for Design) and Bill Moggridge (IDEO). My job was to enjoy the panel discussion and try to get as much as I could down into a notes section. Amy told me she followed along a bit and thought there were four people contributing, not just me. I take that as a both a compliment and verification that I am verbose. I’m not sure there was much conclusion reached, but it was definitely refreshing to hear the comments—particularly those by Terry and Meg—validate our take on design education at IU.

The evening’s reception was awesome. No human circus acts, but there was a lot of traditional dancing (belly and otherwise). There were also mounds of food, some of which was actually vegetarian. I took advantage of the small helpings to start wending my way through the Swag nation. I nabbed pens from everyone, got some trinkets that flashed and glowed, but the real belle of the ball was a stress ball from Sun that glowed when you squeezed it. Several people flocked to Sun when I told them where I got it, but all were shut out. For today, I am King of Swag.

There were also some interesting booths, including a few eye gazing tools for usability testing. Sun’s demo was for a physical device that could communicate with a computer by passing an LED light back and forth. I’m not sure what the applications are (they weren’t either, really), but it had the potential to be a cool ingredient in some future design.

The student design competition got news of the finalists, which included two of the five teams from Indiana. Ri-Ri is a design to help bus conductors in Madras, India, and Celerometer completely redefined the design problem to focus on improving efficiency of school buses. The Hoosier teams and two others, from Michigan and a school in Mexico, now have a day to prep for a 10-minute presentation on Wednesday morning. I’ll be taping that session (and the to others that follow) for the experimental ACM archive. Hopefully, there will be cause to celebrate further.

The celebration tonight featured some good pizza and garlic fries. Also, the masters students got a certain professor (name withheld to protect the program) hammered with some pink beverages until he began drunk dialing them to find out what they were doing. At last report, our beloved prof had returned to the safety of his wireless connection in his hotel and switched to drunk messaging.

Some of the Indiana photo streams are finally starting to make their way up to the web. Good news for those of us (there are others, right?) without cameras.