Arjan Geven - Weens World

I just returned from the MobileHCI conference in Singapore… a photo impression of the city…

Hotel lobby..

Conference site

View from the top.. (Equinox bar)

I went together with Freek on a trip on Whitsun-Monday to the hills in the North of Vienna. The weather was “wechselhaft” at least (i.e. stormy).

It’s been quite a while, but back to business. After a very long period of silence, time to give some updates! Have been traveling quite a bit lately, and it seems to have had an influence on the amount of blog posts here.

So, what have I been up to in the last few months? Well, let’s begin with say I’m still working at CURE , and still mainly working on the project Laboranova , dealing with innovations idea stimulation, support and management. We are still in the process of defining the exact boundaries of the system, and my role is to ensure a match between user needs and system functionality. This is of course relatively tough when uses normally see idea generation as a “black box” process that just happens. Through user involvement we try to find out which areas can particularly be supported and (hopefully) also how. As I’m writing this, I’m traveling to such a user involvement workshop J reviewing a Laboranova ‘storyboard’ that shows Some of the main functionality of the future system, based on early mockups and discussions.

I’ve also done some work on preparing for the next round of EU project support, focusing on user acceptance, usability and accessibility of ict for the support of older people. This took quite some time, travel and energy, hopefully it pays of! Competition is tough and the budget is small, so all we can do now is hope for the results of the evaluation. With 126 submitted “small and medium-sized” project, the chances of acceptance are rather low (statistically seen, somewhere between 2-3% I guess). I hope the invested time pays off!

Now, back to Laboranova development!

As made out last year, we’d go snowboarding this year, together with Guus and Olga. Finalizing the plans around Christmas, we had already experienced the general winter temperatures of the year, and decided to search for snow way up in the mountains, at the Kaunertaler Gletscher (station at around 2700 meter, up to 3000-somethings).

We found an hotel in the village “near” the area, requiring a 45-min drive every morning and afternoon. However, the hotel was good, the weather was good and the snowboarding conditions were good! Just our snowboarding skills.. well.. they still need a bit of work. Taking lessons on the first day, Nora, Olga and me decided to continue ourselves the second day, whereas Guus took another lesson on day two.
A few pictures say more than thousand words..

Spent the Christmas days in the Netherlands, New year’s eve in Bregenz.. and now back in Vienna again! Photos will follow soon . Anyway, had a very good time at both places!

Oh, and I’ll try to update more regularly again.. I see it’s been a while.

Yay, some friends from the Netherlands drove over here for a visit! Had a very good time! I even saw some things I didn’t see in Vienna myself yet, such as the pub “The Little Stage” (although just 2 minutes from our place), the karaoke bar and the Christkindlmarkt at Rathausplatz. Well, I guess the pictures speak for themselves!

Last Sunday, it was time for Santa Lucia songs, Glögg and Pepparkakor (did I write that right?) at the Swedish Bazar in Vienna! We arrived just in time for the 15h songs. Very, very nice!

It turns out there’s quite an active Swedish community living in Vienna, I subscribed to their newsletter as well .

The poster:

So, I moved from Blogger to WordPress, because it gives me more freedom to do what I want, and it’s all under my control now. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a good way to transfer all posts & comments from the old site to the new site yet. So, just a few are available at the moment. Let’s see if a working import/export function will become available once….