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.