Pat’s Point of View

Well, after piking early last night and going home, I had little trouble in getting to the 9 AM start in good shape, but I think others were a bit worse for wear :)

Today’s topics were less interesting than yesterday, but I found Julia Prior’s Technology Designers as Technology Users intriguing, especially considering my technical background. I also enjoyed Christos Katsanos‘ InfoScent Evaluator talk, although I don’t think that will ever be any better than a simple QA tool similar to an web accessibility validation tool. On the subject of accessibility it was good to hear Chris Law’s talk on the usability of accessibility guidelines for designers, except for the fact that he totally excluded web accessibility from his study (he had a reason but I’m not convinced it’s valid).

To wrap things up today, Bill Gaver gave an excellent keynote, which like the opening keynote, was very inspirational and had us all thinking how cool our work could be. But in reality most of us have much less freedom to do work we really want to do, even those with access to cushy research grants :)

His talk was a wonderful mix of interaction design, industrial design, ethnography, film-making and art. And I love the exploratory nature of his work; sniffing around life and seeing what things might be cool to build and play with. I particularly like the drift table, which I would happily place in my living room.

I think the things I have got out of this conference have been that there are lots of different people working in the rough area of HCI, taking many a different approach, and using different talents and skills. We all need to focus on what it is we are good at and want to do, then do it, then appreciate and utilise everyone else’s choice.

I also think we can all learn from one another too. For example, I readily admit that I don’t have a academic background and could certainly learn much theory behind the work I do. On the other hand I think the academy still needs to learn from industry and practitioners operating in commercial environments. One example of this is that a few of the academic presentations I saw lacked real-world credibility, they came across as nothing more than nice big terms for quite simple (but valid) techniques. Trying to pass off some research that involved observation and listening to people as something more than that, by giving it a fancy title, is not building any credibility in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, there are many researchers doing great stuff, but some need to drop the pretence, and stop looking down on practitioners who use the same methods without the name. (They could also learn to prepare more succinct and to-the-point presentations).

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