Visit to Copenhagen and Lund for NordiCHI conference

And it’s time for another conference! Last Friday I left for the NordiCHI conference in Lund with my colleagues Alex, Dries and Jeroen. Because the most efficient way to travel to Lund is to fly to Copenhagen and take the train from there to Lund, we decided to leave earlier and to stay in Copenhagen for a day. Dries booked us a comfortable room in the Danhostel (which felt like a night train that isn’t moving), which was very cosy.
We arrived quite late on Friday evening, so we had a quick dinner (which was good actually, with a home-made veggie burger and eight different sauces – not kidding) and some cocktails. Saturday we wandered around the city centre of Copenhagen, visited the Danish Design Centre (which was not too big and had rather strange stuff)and did some white Lego building. Later in the afternoon we took the train to Lund, where we had an all-Swedish dinner (Ikea meat balls and Chocolate Moose - nice movie for fans of the Swedish Chef).

Sunday was the first day of the conference, on which we had workshops. Dries and I went to a workshop on lo-fi haptic prototyping, which was a good workshop. We started with presentations and demonstrations of (supposedly) lo-fi prototypes, though most of the prototypes were quite hi-fi (especially compared to Eise’s home made MDF mobile phone I brought). I especially liked the physical (lego) avatar, the Wizard of Oz haptic feedback by sending a sound file to a mobile phone in silent mode, Nokia’s universal gesture alphabet, the concept of “body storming” and the Philips “shiver down my spine” vest.
In the afternoon we had a lo-fi prototyping session, in which we were divided into four groups and had to make a (you guessed it) lo-fi haptic prototype. There was some really nice stuff to make the prototypes of (balloons, magnets, lego, modelling clay, foam, etc.) and we did quite a few interesting discoveries (when you put a magnet into a balloon, inflate the ballon and stick another magnet to the magnet inside the balloon, the balloon pops!).

Today was the first day of a keynote and paper sessions of the conference. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed by the quality and the content of the presentations. Also, I’m afraid that the keynote (of a Firefox t-shirt wearing speaker) was a bit too geeky for a large part of the audience, although I liked his concept of Evil Design. Interesting exceptions were a presentation about measuring bodily movements with a desk chair (although I’m not quite convinced of the validity of such movements as a measure of emotions) and a presentation about designing for participation in public knowledge institutions (which included the virtual peepholes into the ocean which I reported on at the Participatory Design Conference).
After the conference we had a short tour of the Museum of Sketches for Public Art and a Microsoft reception (apparently, Microsoft is fond of BiFi sausages and soepstengels). Fortuately, Jeroen and I spotted a sushi bar earlier in the afternoon, and we had quite some fun with different styles of eating sushi (fingers and wobbly chopsticks).

Conference venue (Lund University).