post CHI2006

All of sudden, the thousands of people, the hectic hallways, the enthusiastic talks, the witty conversations, the packed parties, etc, became a matter of the past. Every morning, people came from different directions, aggregated in Palais des Congres at the center of Montreal and disppeared into different rooms to participate in intellectual or non-intellectual exchange. Every evening, people dispersed from the Palais des Congres and entered into bars, resturants and parties to strike out new ideas, new stories and new social relationships. It has been an exciting and exhausting week. Now, the conference is over, and people start to pack and see what they can bring back from this intensive or even overwhelming week.

On the stage set up by CHI, there are figures standing in the spotlights, stressed by the amplified visual and audio effects. Some are more passionate, claiming their new findings from their fields; some are more composed, introducing their work in a orderly manner; some speak very fast, making you wonder whether you need to take a train or flight to catch it; some have strong accent, giving the conference a exotic flavor;some are humourous and playful, offerring a little break for us to breath from the scientific and academic "rigor"; some scratch and reflect on the CHI itself, winning applause from the audience; but probably most of them make you wander around, sliding into an internal conversation with yourself. In the background, there is hand shaking, there is "Hi, I am..", there is card distribution, there is drinking, etc, sometimes, even busier than the "foreground". Probably, the most exciting thing is still that during the conference, you see all the familiar but dry names become people in the flesh that can walk and talk and show the sides that won't be accessible on a paper. Now the conference is closed, and we are reflecting on who we are, who we met, what happened, what we found, and what we can get from it.

There are many technologies and designs striving to keep lovers, family and friends connected remotely. They use the mundane artifacts such as one bit(Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye), slippers (ComSlipper) and cups (Lover's Cups) to transfer love signals. They sense motions, temperatures and clicks, and translate and transmit them into meaningful reactions remotely. To them, such simple things as drinking can be very psychologically, and socially meaningful. You are drinking to relax, to calm down, and to keep yourself busy in a diversity of social situations. Aslo, drinking could be very culturally sensitive, and the same drinking can integrated into different forms into different cultures. This is an explicit effort to fight for absence by providing virtual presence. There are also people who work on theoretical framework, and using linguistic features for analysis and measurement of presence. However, Russell Beale offers an observation how people are mentally or virtually absent when they are physically present while we, as technology designers, are striving to provide virtual presence to complement the physical absence. We are writing emails, enagaging in conversations through IM and browsing web sites while we are sitting in the conference rooms. We are cocooning ourselves using the headsets on the street and cut ourselves off from the "real" and "rich" world - there is no hustle and bustle of people and there is no bird sing and people talking but loud musics from the headsets. Although they seem to drive into two opposite directions, I would rather see them as the same line of technology that enables us to negotiate the presence and absence.

While technologies are enabling sharing, communication, and collaboration, technologies are are disruptive, so not little effort is focused on making technologies less disruptive. Mark Altosaar and others provide a technique called AuraOrb to check our eye contact to predict our interruptability. Others developed statistical models to predict our responsiveness to incoming instant messages.While we want to create more fun and engaging games, we are facing a problem about how to measure fun and pleasure and emotion. So our muscle is detected (EMG by Richard L. Hazlett) and vision equipment is deployed to learn whether we are happy or not.

There are more technologies that make music composing, personalization, drawing, picture editing and comics making more accessible to the lay person, and even to the disabled, as well as invent new forms of engagement such as "the affective remixer" and "BashoCam".

While we are interacting with the world to get our business done, we are too close to make sense of it. Now more and more visiualizations are designed to help us step back and visualize the patterns so meaning can emerge and be revealed, such as Fernanda B. Biegas's email visualization.

Location awareness still attract a lot of interests and attentions. Here is location-based reminder application and there is application development method for location tracking techiques for Wizard of Oz Testing.

Technology is not just for function, but also for expression to signal who you are such as Urbanhermes. Mobile phone is not just for communication and sharing, but also for us to kill boredom, fill the break, manage our mood, and keep ourselves busy as a way to deal with awkardness in certain social situations, according to Akseli Anttila (I added the last point:-)). We can also make boring interactions more fun by using tangible computing technologies, such as using dancing to editing our emails.

Privacy is still a big issue. More terms and words keep coming, such as "incidental information privacy" by Kirstei Hawkey. Some turn attention from privacy itself and prevent us from being watched and mornitored to see how we feel more comfortable being watched and mornitored, and what is cultural and social meaning behind it.

While usable security still drives very active research explorations, some people suggest that the reason why encrypted e-mail is not used is not usability, but some social meanings associated with it. Social meaning is gaining stronger and stronger voice. It also sheds light on how we can understand achiving activities, which seem to be weird if we ignore the social meaning associated with it.

nice start

Today's reception was amazing, especially the circus acrobatics. It is just beyond what i can say so many words (Totally moved by the french music. After I go back to Irvine, I could also post some pictures). The food was great too. After a glass of wine, I was very relaxed, walking around, meeting some friends, seeing some familiar faces, having a palm reader telling my fortune - I have a lot of fun. I think they put posters in this reception event might not be a very good idea - too relaxed to be able to engage in those(It is strange that I do not remember how last year's reception go. )

I was also impressed by Joseph 'Hofish' Kaye and Jenet Vertesi' talk today. I was trying to figure out why. Is it because of the content? Because of the topic? Because of the way of presenting? Or because of their personality? I think the last one might be the most important! Just like what Scott Cook was told by his "loving wife" about how to present in this year's opening plenary session, "don't be charming, don't be smart, just be yourself!" Exactly, i think the reason why their presentation was so engaging is because they were totally themselves on the stage, the same feeling I got from Stewart hosting this year's oscar. It is so simple to say, but so hard to do! (thinking of staying in front of hundreds of people delivering a 15 to 20 minutes talk. Not everyone can do it well.) I think giving a presentation is hard enough already, the even harder one is the question answering part . Today, I just experienced such a presentation. I thought the presentation was good, the visualization was beautiful and intriguing. However, at the end of the presentation, somebody stood up and began with "I was troubled by the presentation...", and continued with "What did you learn from the project"... Can't not image how I would respond if the presenter was me, but the presenter took it very well!

I took many pictures and videos today. post them later...

"about face"

Just want to jot down what I have experienced in today's "about face:creative engagement" workshop when the ideas are still warm and oscillating in my mind.

Today, we started with brainstorming some of the themes, concepts, and ideas emerging from yesterday's presentations. At first, we categorized them into 5 groups: methodology/evaluation/research practices; epistemology/knowledge/constructions; Education/pedagogy; organization/institutions; Aesthetics vs. process.
However, we constantly experienced some difficulties in deciding which belongs to which. What was interesting to me is I can see how some of the themes and theories and practices I have been reading and thinking have also been reflected and discussed from other practices and disciplines. I think "Translation" is a very telling word describing how people engaging in different domains have to struggle to communicate with each other about those actually similiar concerns but having different appearances. "translation" is a naturally outcome when fields are differentiated and tried to identify themselves.

(This is also resonant one of the groups' disucssion about institution in the afternoon. While we are struggling to lay down a foundation, and to maintain a knowledge base for reproduction, education, identity and autonomy, we are also setting a wall for others to enter into this field. Once the institution is established, later potential members have to learn and acquire that knowledge to be able to contribute to it. come back to this later..)

After that, we broke up into 4 groups following the discussion. The topic for our group was "epistemology/knowledge/constructions". Since this topic is relatively distant from real world practices, it prevented us from expressing ourselves fully. Most of the themes and concepts under this category are very much human constructed, and the condition for us to engage in this kind of discussion is to read similiar literatures and understand some of the concepts, and establish a common vocabulary. This creates some hurdles for us to have productive discussions in a couple hours, especially for us who have just met the first time. To me, it is particulary challenging to get my points across (since english is my second language). I got explicitly feedback that people had troubles understanding me and were kind of uncomfortable sometimes. Getting my point across is hard already, not to mention how to express my points in a friendly and constructive way. But, I felt three of us who are closer to HCI backgrounds tend to share more common ground and can easily achieve understanding. What i learned from this experience is : for people with different backgrounds to discuss productively, we should start with practical topics, so people will have more things to say and contribute, rather than theories. I was a little bit frustrated from this discussion. It seems we have a lot of difficulties to communicate with each other, and I didn't see a coherent theme running across the issues arising. However, when in the afternoon, we need to present our discussion, Sara and Palema did a great job to summerize.

Of the four presentations, the Education/pedagogy group triggered the hottest discussion. I guess part of the reason is many workshop participants have teaching backgrounds, and really have a lot of experiences of some of the issues and concerns. One thing impressed me is the power of politics. The choice of tools, the way to attract students to come, and how to encourage multidisplinary conversation all have something to do with politics. The issue of shared space is also brought up. One example is concordia university, where art students and engineering students share a building, (which is designed to be shared) and this shared space has led to more students to be interested in media art. Another very interesting issue is how students really learn about media art. What is the role of mentoring or more formal education versus learning by online community or other forms of participation? How do they learn outside of the class? Whether we should teach them tools or just principles? What are the differences between studio, classroom and lab? The only difference is space arrangement? What is the core of this discipline, or is there discipline yet? Maybe because I haven't thought about those issues seriously, they all sound fresh to me.

We also think about the future of new media art. How can we have a voice in HCI community?How do these two communities can benefit each other? How can we open and continue the dialogue?( I hear the voice in my heart saying,"If we can do great job and make impressive works, people we intiate the conversation! Everybody loves creativity!" But I know the answer is not that simple) .

Anyway, I stop here today. Tomorrow's opening plenary is at 8:30. (Still feel angry that when I was urged by my starving stomach to go to the networking events to find some food, the food was already gone when I got there!)

Montreal for CHI

This is my second time at CHI conference and the first time to attend CHI workshop. While yesterday's struggling is still vividly in my mind, now I have already had the first day of workshop in Montreal. A whole day's introductions and presentations and meeting new people is really a lot, but so far I really enjoy it. It is a creative engagement workshop, and I really appreciate that I could have this opportunity to interact with these creative people. Some of the issues we as computer scientists have been debating, and struggling, have already been naturally incorporated in there artistic and design practices.

The small games played during the workshop are worth a few words. At the beginning, through picking jelly beans of different colors, we were asked to answer different questions telling about our working and collaborative experiences. Through such a way, we got to learn about each other. At the end, we were seperated into different groups, and asked to design human machines with each individual as a component in the machine. They also provided kitchen appliances as props. So people play with pans, with rubber, balls, strings, hammer, etc, as materials showing how a human machine work. Our group got up to the desk late, so we can only took the left over. But our group has really creative people, Greg, Palema, Nick. They came up with a lot of good ideas, making the components of our people machine very collaborative, and the playing with the material very interactive. I had such an enjoyable experience with this group of people.

We had lunch at China town. I think the organizer picked a very good restaurant, because the food was great. However, the end of day, I heard some people saying "NO China town anymore". I don't know how I should interpret it, but I guess it reminds me how easily we impose our own judgement and experiences on others.

I didn't take notes about the talks in the workshop. I tried my best to recall, so to hold them before they disappear.

One amazing thing I found from this group is, in their practices, meaning and structure coming out from interactions and actions, rather then determining interactions is very deeply seated, and taken for granted, which is in stark contrast with computer science and HCI, where we are still taking pains to argue for that, and fighting for the position of phenomenology against the domination of positivism. Here, practices are so much stressed, and participation is their common language, where in HCI, we just started to pay attention to it.

"not restriction" is very much emphasized in new media design, and they are proud of saying that they always put no restriction on students to design and try. It seems that is the way for creativity. But is it enough?

It is also funny to see that there are a couple of cognitive psychologists interested in new media art and have done very interesting work.

Many works are about music making, and they have offerred all these inspiring approaches for interaction: walking to make musics, eye tracking to make musics, collectively clicking on a visual interface to produce music collaborative (I love that music)...

This group is very much concerned with social relationship, awareness of environment whether it is social or ecological, community building, multidisciplinary collaboration and of course creativity.

Leave it here...
Will add the dramatic trip to montreal later..