Florence - CHI2008

This year the CHI2008 event was in Florence, Italy. This was my first time in CHI and in Florence. Both interesting, but for me looking backwards now CHI was much more of an attraction. I was amazed by size of the event, so many UI experts in one place, how comes there are still UI problems out there?

First thing I liked in Italy is the toilet. Asking what is to like in Italian toilets? Well you can operate most of them without touching anything with your hand, my dream! Most sinks are operated by the foot, and some of the blushers as well. One more thing that shows an interesting approach for solving problems was found in the man toilets (well that where I went). Instead of changing the urinal toilet bowl the designer changed the floor and added a drainage where the problem occurs (you know dripping on the floor).See the picture bellow and we are done with this subject.

The event was loaded with interesting sessions, 6 at a time. Presenting a vast range of topics, e.g. visualization, security, touch interaction, mobile devices, collaboration issues, large screens and much much more. The papers presented there were different from each other in approaches and vision but the most distinct difference was in the slides (see bellow some samples). From beautiful gentle layout and typography to wild colors, animations and other effects. It seems though that there is a fashion of displaying big pictures and little to non text, while the speaker talks the ideas over. This seems to be a very impressing and useful to the audience, very visual. It allows the listeners to stay focus on the subject. BUT these presentations are not standalone, I like to think that a presentation should still be useful without the narrator. I tend to share my presentations with others, send them to review sometimes (the important ones) and they are useless without some text. Of course it heavily depends on the type of the presentation.

Other things that I went through my mind during the sessions were:

1. Will my grandchildren learn in school and use hand writing in someway or writing will turn into some sort of art? So will they go to a special craft shop and order a hand written grating card for my 99 birthday?
2. Usability is considered in many cases as a nice to have, or added if the budget allows. It is a quite expensive overhead for many project. So should we deliver Usability to the people? Meaning should usability interaction design and all that be cheaper and more accessible as a long term investment in the IT world? I told this to one of my colleagues and she almost eat me alive, saying usability should be more expansive and looked at as a elite character of an elite product, differentiating one product from the crowed. Did someone say iPod? Why not having 100 cool MP3 players with all sorts of groovy interaction methods instead of all the cheap stuff?

Along the “normal” sessions in CHI there were two different types of sessions, that I found interesting and inspiring. The fist is called alt.CHI in which good papers that did not fit to other sessions were presented, usually they included a spicy twist in them. The second was Design Theater, in which the idea of using personas was stretched beyond the familiar concept. User interaction researchers work together with real theater actors, scriptwriters and directors when exploring requirements for new products. The actors actually play a situation. In one case a golden age couple who have a smart digital house that is supposed to assist them… only supposed to. After the play the audience could talk with the characters and ask them questions. It was very interesting and I guess can be a good tool, in some cases better than the game we play in our heads when designing interaction.
Finally, we (the group from …) presented this paper called “All the news that’s fit to e-ink”, enjoy reading.