Thursday at PDC08

Apart from a neat goodie I got today (it was a Replublican chapstick, almost as cool as the Pim Fortuyn supermarket cart coin we have), here are some highlights from Thursday at the conference. I attended two sessions of plenary research papers and one session of exploratory papers (the exploratory paper sessions being the six parallel sessions). As on Wednesday, the papers in the exploratory session provided me with quite some food for thought. One presentation was about "Participatory Sensing", an interesting concept where mobile phones are used as environmental sensors for nearly anything. So people can use their mobile phones to capture, share, access, analyse and store information on the go. Since everyone has different mobile phones with different features, many different things can be captured (e.g. photos of the environment, bumpiness of the road (by using accelerometers), locations and routes (GPS), personal experiences (e.g. text), sound recordings). When adding all of this captured context information together, interesting applications for sharing and collaboration emerge. An example that was used in the presentation was a project called CycleSens, where cyclists collect and share information about their routes to work.

Another idea that I liked was the use of a scale model for participatory redesign. In this case the scale model was of a particular piece of a road which was prone to many accidents. In participatory design sessions end users and road engineers were invited to redesign that stretch of road (with all kinds of tools, like trees, thicker striping, colours, etc.). I am usually working on quite small products I'd like to design together with users, but this is a nice solution to design on a larger scale (could also be used for buildings, for example).

An interesting point that was mentioned in a number of presentations already is the communication between end users and professionals in sessions (e.g. engineers, architects, etc.). A common problem seems to be that the language used by the professionals is totally incomprehensible to the end users, something to keep in mind when doing participatory design sessions. In one study presented, two sessions were organised, one with and one without the professionals, to really make sure that the end user needs were addressed properly, without focusing too much on the professionals' ideas.

Finally, I'd like to mention one plenary presentation, which interestingly enough was a literature review on participatory design. What I liked about this presentation though, was that the presenter (Andy Dearden) was very critical and for me really pointed out some interesting issues. Some quotes (might not be exactly litteraly): "Is participatory design for IT an oxymoron?" "How participatory is participatory design when users can participate in a project when the researchers tell them to and in the way the researchers want them to?" This last quote remembered me of a discussion we had in the MobileHCI workshop last month, where we considered the idea of asking users not only to participate in co-design sessions, but also to participate in deciding on the methods to use in the co-design session.

So, these I guess were the highlights of Thursday for me. Since the weather is very nice here (lots of sun and quite high temperatures), we took some time to relax in the late afternoon. Thursday was also the day of the conference banquet, which had great deserts and also a great group of female singers. Later at night we went into the city centre to drink cocktails and to go to the Lotus Festival, where we sneaked into a big tent to see a really cool band, Funkadesi playing a wild mixture of world music styles (reggae, Indian music, African, Latin, nearly everything).

So now I'm up to the final day of the conference (which is not a full day anymore). And tomorrow, it's Chicago time!!