Arjan Geven - Weens World

I visited the IST Event 2006 in Helsinki last week, very interesting! A lot of projects presented, a lot of information on the seventh framework programme for ICT research funding. Met a lot of people, didn’t get all that much sleep.

At CURE, we are mainly interested in the challenges dealing with health care and assisted living, as well as the transport (human centered design) challenge that was presented. Collaborative work seems a bit underrepresented in the new framework programme, although digitally enhanced learning is one of the challenges as well. We’ll see!

Today is world usability day, for those who didn’t know.

At CURE, every day is a usability day…. No open events organized by us today. USECON does host a “Usability Club” tomorrow evening though, topic is Online Job Searches.

I traveled to Barcelona last week to perform contextual inquiries for the Laboranova project (the European project I’m mainly working on at CURE), to gather as much user input as early as possible in the design input. These took me two full days and I’ve written lots of notes, gotten some very good ideas for the project and met some very nice people there. I’m still in the process of writing up the results and understanding the main issues that are relevant for the various parts of the Laboranova project. Interesting but complex stuff…

Anyway, I had some time on Saturday before I flew home to Vienna again, so I made a bit of a sight-seeing tour through Barcelona and took some photos!

And then, the photos!

An open place with some nice restaurants around in the old center:

One of the largest indoor markets in Europe, close to Las Ramblas:

A view from the Cathedral:

Still some people at the beach:

Some Gaudi work (study in the foreground, the temple is still being worked on):

By the way, Spanish people speak such a horrible English, I was happy to have landed in an organization who were actually very capable in explaining their work to me, but other than that… phew, some catching up to do there I guess. Next on the list of languages to learn: Spanish.

So far:

1) Fluent in Dutch - check
2) Fluent in English - check
3) Fluent in German - well, still some work to do there
4) Understandable in French - *cough* needs -some- catching up!
5) Understandable in Swedish - *cough* needs -some- catching up!
6) -any- Spanish other than “Si” and “No”

After the conference travelling and all, Nora and I wanted to have some time to relax and most of all, a long-awaited holidays just with the two of us…

And the destination: Castle hotel “Szidonia” in Röjtökmuzsaj, in Hungary. We had a very good time, including a lot of bathing, saunas, steam baths and a very relaxing massage!

Pictures say more than thousand words:

The castle:

The hotel room:

The ballroom:

Nora enjoying the autumn sun outside:

And me, also enjoying the sun:

Here are some pictures I took during my stay in Oslo, as promised.

A view over Oslo from the castle:

Alex Taylor presenting an ethnographical fridge study:

The keynote speaker on monday (Susanne Bødker) presents her view on the “third wave of HCI research”:

The view on the sea, close to the Oslo City Hall:

“Experience is everything”, a poster I spotted the day after the “User Experience workshop”:

I did not take my camera along in Bremen a lot, so unfortunately, no pictures there.

Had a good time at the NordiCHI 2006 in Oslo, where I presented our research on embodied agents in the cognitive vision project and the User Experience research we’ve been doing. I really felt like a sponge there, absorbing so much information coming to me and very interesting research being presented by others.. it’s like standing in a candy store and being allowed to taste from all the candies. How great is that? You should just be careful not to eat too much, and I really left (almost too) full of impressions and new ideas.

This also made the Laboranova project meeting in Bremen a bit tough. Still being absorbed in the frontline of HCI-research, I suddenly had to concentrate for three days on one large project again, trying to catch up on some sleep, and trying to get the most out of seeing everyone together. In such large projects, it’s just so important to keep in touch with each other regularly, and these general meetings are a good way to do so. Unfortunately, they only take place approximately twice a year. Anyway, I got a chance to catch up with most people, and we even got to see some of Bremen in the evenings, with the Freimarkt (kermis) going on there. Coming home friday night, I was exhausted though. At the airport in Vienna, it took a while before I realized that my suitcase would not show up anymore. Some inquiry revealed that it obviously wanted to stay overnight in Frankfurt before returning to me. Bad suitcase, bad bad.

Spent the weekend sleeping mainly, catching up some sleep. I made some pictures, which I will upload here in due time .

The second conference this year coming up, visiting Oslo 14th - 17th of October. I’ll be presenting our view at the Workshop “User Experience – Towards a unified view”. The associated paper is called “Narrations and Storytelling as Methodological Key Elements for Studying User Experience”, by Arjan Geven, Johann Schrammel and Manfred Tscheligi, arguing in favor of holistic methods to study user experience, with a focus on the narrative interview.

At the main conference, NordiCHI 2006, I’ll be presenting our paper “Interacting with embodied agents that can see: how vision-enabled agents can assist in spatial tasks”, again by Arjan Geven, Johann Schrammel and Manfred Tscheligi. This presents a study we performed in relation to the Cognitive Vision project, dealing with embodied animated agents to represent certain assistive computer systems.

Unfortunately, I cannot stay until the very end of the conference, but it’ll be very interesting for sure!

Last week was Helsinki week, with a four-day conference on mobile human computer interaction (http://mobilehci.soberit.hut.fi) and a workshop on modelling user assistance in intelligent environments.

The short version: many great ideas, a lot of great research and a lot of eye openers, not a lot of sleep, but many nice people. And a lot of flying mobile phones at the first social event . I’ll post some pictures I took later on, in the meanwhile, you can take a look at flickr for photos that have been uploaded by other mobilehci06 participants.

At the conference, I presented a paper related to the work I did last year at CURE as I was writing my master’s thesis on the structuring of information for mobile devices, which actually drew quite a few people. I hope people enjoyed it…

I found out some people will be joining in for the workshop on User Experience and the Nordichi conference in Oslo in October, too. Great to meet some new and known people there!

It’s been a while, I know, so here’s an extra-double post to make up for that…

A month ago already, you know when the sun was still shining, the swimsuits being used, the holidays not completely starting yet, but ongoing temperatures of more then 30 degrees.. Back then, Manon and Peter dropped by for a visit! It really was a long time ago that I last saw them. As it was so hot, we didn’t do to many things: a very relaxing visit, swimming at Gänsehäufl, sleeping through the morning, Prater filmfestival (Nosferatu, 1927), Leopold museum, MuseumsQuartier, not the most exhausting things . But, a very good way of spending a way too hot weekend!

Manon and Nora walking through the Schönbrunnerstraße:

Peter, Manon and Nora at MQ:MQ as seen from the Leopoldmuseum:

Manon in Prater:

After that, Nora left me. No, not like that, but to Bregenz, as for her, the holidays had already started a while ago, and went to a class reunion there. I followed a week later. One of the bigger disadvantages of the working life, the (rather small) amount of free days per year…

Anyway we (Nora, her mother, and me) to Corsica by car, taking the “Corsica Ferries” ferry from Savona. A seven-hour drive, a short night on the boat, and breakfast on the island and a two-hour drive there to the apartment where we were staying.

Sunny, windy, rough, beautiful are words that spring to mind. See for yourself.

Some observations. Corsica is French. They speak French, I don’t. They also speak ‘Corsisch’ (orwhichever way you translate that), which resembles Italian in many ways. I don’t. Corsica is the poorest region of whole France. Living there is very expensive, Île Rousse, the town we lived close to has approximately 1500 citizens throughout the year, and about 55.000 in summer. It is clear that the traffic system on the island is not built on those amounts of people. 60% of the Corsican people is over sixty, and Corsica has a very high unemployment rate compared to other regions of France. But, the beaches, the nature is wonderful!

The dreaded Corsica ferry:

As Nora had her last course in Graz (at least for this year) and, well, it’s summer, I also headed south to spend the weekend at her aunt and uncle, which was definitely worth the three-hour journey! We walked up the “Schlossberg” on Saturday evening as the yearly jazz-festival took place. The view up there is great: you can see all over the city, accompagnied by some jazz music. I tried to capture the view on a photo, but well, it was pretty dark already…

On Sunday, the four of us went to one of the most beautiful regions of Austria is the Süd-Steiermark, about 50km under Graz, also known as the Toscana of Austria! Except for the “wasp-incident”, really really a fine place to be!

The day passed way too fast, and as we had to sit a few hours in the train still, we had to leave rather early… but we’ll be back!!

Some photos: