Highlight of the day(s) @ PDC08

So I've just returned to my hotel room after the first real day of the Participatory Design Conference (first day was workshops & tutorials) to give a quick overview of the highlights of the day here in Bloomington. In general, I like the atmosphere here. Although many people seem to know each other quite well from earlier editions of the conference, most of them seem very open and interested.

The best presentation of today for me was Carl DiSalvo's talk about a really cool project called Neighbourhood Networks. In this project, people from a specific neighbourhood were invited to participate in a series of 8 workshops in which they would design a robotics and sensor-based prototype. What really got me thinking was the way in which the participants were introduced to the technologies of robotics and sensors in a totally hands-on fashion. Usually, introduction to technology is a difficult thing in participatory design, but in this project participants were just told to use the technology as they pleased in their own neighbourhood, which seemed to work just fine! Also, what I'd really like to try out once is to organize a series of workshops in stead of just one (or a few). Here, participants had one workshop per week, which allowed them during the week to think over their prototypes, collect materials, test their prototype, etc.

I also took some good topics to think about from the Exploratory Papers session (of which there were six parallel sessions, which is way too much at such a small conference, we were with about ten people in the audience only). One of the presentations was about using cultural probes with participants who are visually impaired, which poses quite a challenge in designing the probes. Since I am about to start working on a project involving users with disabilities (in hearing, vision, cognition), I was quite interested to see how the authors of this paper dealt with their target group. I saw quite some interesting stuff (i.e. using clay to "illustrate" one's context, "photography by proxy"), and I also noted some interesting considerations to spend some time thinking and discussing about ("How to make probing and designing materials attractive to people with visual impairments since you cannot use visuals as you would normally do?", Doing observations to learn about user driven innovation at home in stead of using cultural probes, etc.).

So, enough stuff to use in some way in my own work! We ended the day (after a reception - Belgian style almost, except for the fact that we got one drink ticket only, which seems more the Dutch style) watching the vice presidential debate in a lecture room full of IU students, a true American experience! Not a really spectacular debate though (no blood or any physical encounters, but highly polite smiles only - I suspect Palin and Biden have the same dentist), no clear winner and nothing new. But quite fun anyway.