chi 2009, wrap-up
CHI ended with a bang. As in, me banging my head against the seat in front of me, hoping to erase the awful memories of the closing speech. Some professor from a Dutch design school went on and on about what I could only classify as "design for the sake of design". His presentation style was lethargic, the text on the slides was microscopic, and on top of it all the guy chose to dress like Steve Jobs. Argh.
But, all frustrations aside, I got a lot of useful stuff out of CHI. On the last day, I participated in a great SIG discussion on user research in online social networks. The general outcome was "IRB, you ain't seen nothing yet". I happened to sit next to a guy from Facebook who complained of researchers circumventing privacy controls (and Facebook's TOS) by joining geography-based networks and screen-scraping to their heart's content. There was also some interesting stuff coming out of IBM's Beehive... oh, and some great smackdowns regarding the concept of "aesthetics".
As my co-worker put it, it's good to check CHI out every couple of years to see what's going on in the field. Maybe the field should do a better job separating fluff from stuff, though.
But, all frustrations aside, I got a lot of useful stuff out of CHI. On the last day, I participated in a great SIG discussion on user research in online social networks. The general outcome was "IRB, you ain't seen nothing yet". I happened to sit next to a guy from Facebook who complained of researchers circumventing privacy controls (and Facebook's TOS) by joining geography-based networks and screen-scraping to their heart's content. There was also some interesting stuff coming out of IBM's Beehive... oh, and some great smackdowns regarding the concept of "aesthetics".
As my co-worker put it, it's good to check CHI out every couple of years to see what's going on in the field. Maybe the field should do a better job separating fluff from stuff, though.
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