Do you ever have a variety of disparate deadlines and you would like to keep track of them in a very visual way?
Quite often academics have this problem in that there are a number of possible conferences or journal issues that have deadlines not only for submission of your paper, but if accepted you then have a deadline on “camera ready” editions of your work, a deadline for registration, and of course the conference itself.
What if you could see how many days you had left in a countdown kind of style until the deadlines of these various conferences?
This could be a customized webpage or a “widget” associated with igoogle, yahoo, google toolbar, or something native to your OS. Though you could of course enter in your own deadlines, you could however search for conferences and other things by keyword or tags assigned to them as others upload their due dates. One could also create lists of conferences and journals and you could import a list wholesale.
I imagine there are a number of ways this could be used, but this is the one I can think of most readily.
Who wants to make this one? Go ahead and steal it, attribution would be nice, but hey, in this game execution counts for a lot more than the idea.
Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category
Please steal this idea
November 11th, 2009, posted in Conferences, innovationInnovation Methods
October 12th, 2009, posted in Conferences, Grad School, innovationI have begun my PhD journey into the world of innovation methods. I have been thinking about what I think innovation is. My first working definition is the creation of a new experience. I should first qualify that I am using the word experience as a port-manteau kind of catch-all term that envelopes everything from products or artifacts, to systems, or services to something that can only be described as an experience such as cirque de soleil or Disneyland (for one take on types of innovation see doblin’s ten types). When I say new I mean some facet of it is new, it may only be the packaging, or branding, or it may be a feature, or it may be the way it is marketed or a combination of some of these or other things I haven’t mentioned but are equally applicable.
Methods are activities, processes, or tools used while innovating. I haven’t worked on a good working definition for methods, and am open to suggestions of course.
One of the first challenges of my project is that innovation happens all over an organization, and Philips is certainly no exception to this. There are people in traditional R&D functions (like where I am in Philips Research) and people in various business units (or sectors as we like to call them at Philips) as well as people in strategy, marketing, marketing intelligence, and design. Just getting a handle on what all these various departments are doing is a massive undertaking, so I’ve begun interviews all over Philips to start understanding what is happening and to digest this information. At the same time I am trying to make sure that my present work adds some value to my department before I am ready to start producing some kind of intervention into a process with a new process or training or whatever it is I will choose to do.
Of course the other thing that is constantly on my mind is that this is not just about Philips, but rather any organization, so I am working on reaching out to other organizations to see how they are doing this and how it works for them. I certainly will need help to do this, so anyone reading this, if you work in an organization and would be willing to talk to me about innovation methods, please contact me.
The last thing of course is targeting my findings for publication in various places. Of course various design-oriented venues come pretty high on my list, I’ve considered some communications venues (as communication between parts of an organization are so important in innovation), and I’m still actively looking for other high quality venues for either journal articles or or conference presentations (and certainly for the next 2 years or so doctoral consotiums or other similar venues where the feedback and interaction is high would make a lot of sense). Again I welcome any all all suggestions for these.
The big move, working at Philips, and CHI
September 11th, 2009, posted in Conferences, Internal Stuff, Research, innovationSo it’s been a long while since I’ve taken the time to blog. I never thought it would let it go this long, but here we are with a big several-month-long gap in blogging. Essentially the 3 big things that have and are happening are what are in the title, the move, working at Philips, and working on CHI2010-2011.
I blogged previously about being the preferred candidate, and when I was later offered the position outright I accepted. Then, even after buying tickets and scheduling movers we got the news that my visa/work permit had not come through. This was in late April with a May 15th starting date. It threw us back into limbo while Philips tried to work things out. After much travail we were able to get everything worked out by Late June, so we chose August 1st as a start date. So we flew out on July 29th and stayed in a temporary apartment for a few weeks while we found a house. There was much hullabaloo about finding the right place, and then our stuff was stuck in customs forcing us to stay in the apartment longer, but in the end we’re finally settled in more or less.
Working at Philips has been an interesting experience. Some of the bigger challenges are involved with the fact that I started on Aug 1. For those who are not familiar with how much of western Europe works late July and August are the vacation (though they are more like to say holiday) period. My supervisor here was gone for the entire month plus some, my line manager here also gone for most of the month. As I walked down the hall of my floor in building 34 on the beautiful high tech campus I saw many of them empty each day. I’ve never worked at one of the really large corporations or one that has been around for decades upon decades. While I’m sure they’re not all like this, it’s pretty crazy how much bureaucracy there is. In many ways one part of the company has no idea what another part is doing. A very funny thing happened where I corresponded with the human resources department. As a series of people from different departments came and went from vacation, and changes in job function a huge misunderstanding came about. A concerned HR supervisor type person asked me for a meeting over in the building not too far from mine. After a few minutes of chit-chat he came down to the question, and in a matter of perhaps 15 seconds the whole thing was cleared up and we both laughed. We both kept on laughing as we thanked each other for a fun and easy meeting, and we did it again via email. Almost all these kinds of incidents have happy endings, like when I called the IT helpdesk “engineer” who insisted that the exchange server name I needed to set up mail on my ipod touch didn’t need a top level domain (tld) in order for it to work. Of course that is true on a local network, but I would certainly be taking my handy portable device many places, and even on campus the wireless is outside of the intranet here so yah nice. He insisted that the iphone was not supported so there was little he could do but he pointed me to a site that was designed to help Windoze mobile users set up their phones after 10 mins on the phone. Within a minute I found the super secret information I needed (www.mail.philips com, shockingly difficult stuff) and it worked perfectly. So yes it all does work in the end, but I ask at what cost? I guess that is part of my research, which I will certainly blog more about in the future.
CHI, the premiere venue for those working and researching the topic of Human Computer Interaction is a fun dynamic conference. One visit in 2006 to the annual conference in San Jose and I was hooked. Now I’ve been asked to help organize the student volunteers for the conference in 2010-2011 (Incidentally you can now register for the lottery for 2010). It’s been a blast to be on the organizing committees for these two conferences and get a peak at the tremendous amount of work that it takes to pull a conference like this together. Of course with all that organizing I have perhaps let my own preparation for my submissions suffer a little, but hopefully I’ll still have something to present.
So these are the three things that have been taking my time lately, keeping me away from blogging, but I am sure to be more prolific in the near future.
Designing for experience vs experience design
July 17th, 2008, posted in Conferences, Design, Internal Stuff, Philosophy of Technology, User ExperienceI recently got a nice little email from someone who said they liked the title of the blog. I want to make sure and blog a few times a week, if not more, so I’m using that as my blogging fodder.
The title of the blog is designing for experience, and I often used to talk about being an experience designer, naively thinking that I could, in fact, design an experience and then a person would in fact have the experience I designed. Then the cognitive dissonance started to come… what about when you have an excellently crafted experience, like say Disney World, and people fail to have the experience that was designed. I know my wife didn’t exactly love it. What about the person who’s brother is in the hospital thousands of miles away, but yet they aren’t going home until tomorrow, will they have the same experience as the person without such worries? What about the person who has never seen a disney movie and then arrives to the wonderful world of Disney?
The last example is unlikely in today’s world admittedly, but still the fundamental issue stands: as designers we cannot control someone’s felt experience. The notion of experience involves both a person’s external surroundings as well as internal states of all kinds. McCarthy & Wright talk about the “Threads of Experience” they are the aesthetic, the emotional, the spatio-temporal, and the compositional, and these are but the threads they chose to pick out and explain. Felt, or lived experience is something that is ultimately constructed by the self. I freely acknowledge that we socially construct many different aspects of our lives and even our self concepts, but in the end our experience is uniquely our own and dependent on our previous experiences.
All these thoughts ultimately gelled and came together while at CHI this year and was at the SIG on towards a shared definition of user experience. Throughout the discussion this idea had been developing in my mind. Yes it’s rather elementary after you lay it out, but before then I hadn’t known it. I finally understood why Ian McClelland of Phillips Design calls himself an experience architect, not an experience designer. I was speaking with him after the session and asked him exactly that question, and he looked at me as if I was a little daft. 
Of course that’s why his title is what it is, because he recognizes that the locus of control is not with him, but rather the person who has the experience. We construct something that is then to be experienced by someone else (or by ourselves in a different role).
So as a designer I am here to say that while I strive to design for experiences that will inform, transform, delight, and even amuse people, I recognize that each individual will have their own experience with what is designed, and that experience is. It is reminiscent of Kant’s categorical imperative, not treating other as merely a means to an end, but rather being a member of a kingdom of ends (to paraphrase it as I remember it).
In conclusion I design for experience, a holistic, iterative, people-centered approach where I recognize that ultimately each what people do with what is designed is up to them. Different uses will emerge, and ultimately what I help co-create in this world is not mine, and never will be.
Open Letter to Annual Conference Organizers
April 22nd, 2008, posted in Conferences, Grad School, ResearchDear Conference Organizers:
First of all, thank you for all your hard work and dedication. I know you don’t have to volunteer and put on a conference for all your peers and those aspiring to be your peers. I also know that your taking time to do so will distract from your regular work, whether it be research, teaching, or what have you, so again thanks. I am not writing this to just say thank you though, I have a few complaints.
Website URL:
It is actually much easier to find the conference if there is one website for the organizing organization that puts on the conference that then links and or hosts the conference pages for each year. I have often seen that a department, faculty, school, or univeristy will organize a conference and then not too long afterwards the site gets taken down, or I will find the 1998 conference site for the conference I am looking for. I like the historical aspect of seeing old websites, I really do, but unless it point to current resources as well it’s fairly useless in the longrun. What I propose is this, coolconference.org as the main website and then do 2007.coolconference.org or coolconference.org/2007. This is a good idea if the conference does not spring out of a strong organizing group, but if you have one where the website is active I would say do this: groupsite.org/conferencename/2008, and you could make groupsite.org/conference default to the current year but have all the other years accessible.
Website Design:
Please, oh please, grab as volunteer who knows website design and have them use a nice CSS template. So many are free and many more are $50-100. It’s so worth it. CSS makes it awfully easy to make webpages look consistent, and it’s easy for anyone to create new pages with new content in something like dreamweaver or contribute. Even better, choose a template that works with WordPress and do the whole thing in wordpress, it works amazingly well.
Expect further additions, but for now that is all I have to say. Thank you very much.
Sincereley,
Aaron Houssian