:: Program ::

Lectures:
Monday, August 8:
Riccardo Antonioni, Consorzio Roma Richerche, and Yngve Sundblad, KTH (technoical University), Stockholm:
Ideas and  experience from the Convivio Summer Schools

The co-directors of the Summer Schools in Rome 2003, Split 2004 and Timisoara 2005 present the underlying ideas of sharing, developing and working with interaction design coupled to a local context. Experience, including several examples of atelier projects from previous years, will be presented.


Tuesday, August 9:
Peter Tolmie, Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble:
Investigating Human Practice for Design 'Investigating Human Practice for Design'.

This lecture comes in two parts. In Part I we will look at the reasons why it is important to understand people's actual practices as a part of the process of designing technologies that can effectively support their activities. Having identified the need we will then look at some of the
different ways in which researchers have sought to arrive at that understanding, largely in the context of work practice investigation. In Part II the focus will be more specifically upon ethnographic methods and the particular stance adopted by ethnomethodology, one of the most
important informing perspectives in communities such as CSCW. We will start off by looking at how work practice methodology in places like XRCE has come to focus on approaches that centre upon discovering how people's activities are locally organised in and through commonsense reasoning. Having laid the foundations of this approach we will then move on to a range of findings in the field that have grown out of studies of museums and other sites of historic interest. At the end of the lectures you should have
a) a basic grasp of some of the ways you might yourself try to inform design practice by looking at the things people do, and
b) some pre-existing findings that can be applied to your atelier work on 'Designing Future Experiences of the Past'.

Thursday, August 11:
Bill Gaver, Royal College of Art, London:
Designing for everyday life


Friday, August 12:
Doug Walston, Director of Interaction Design, Motorola, Inc., Chicago:
Interaction design in the Mobile Devices industry


Monday, August 15:
Tracee Wolf, IBM T.J. Watson Research, Hawthorne, New York, 2 topics:
Visualising people and their activity in online spaces

Our goal in the Social Computing Group is to design online systems that support deep, coherent and productive communication among small to medium-sized groups by making participants and their activities visible to one another. I'll cover our approach which involves using a variety of abstract visual cues to portray the presence and activity of individuals and groups in online spaces — we call such visual portrayals “social proxies.” I'll show design prototypes in which we explored ways of expanding the scope of social proxies to support our next generation system: Loops. In particular, I will show an examples that supports three levels of visualization: the fine-structure of activity within a conversation; activity across a community engaged in many conversations; and activity at a global or ‘community of communities’ level.

DESIGN >  ? <  RESEARCH

Is there any design in research?
What is the role of a designer in a technology-oriented research organization?
Will a designer's contributions be considered only a stylistic overlay?
Would a designer's contributions only be considered useful for a very small subset of research activities?
Is design valued in research?

After joining IBM Research as a designer, I struggled with questions such as these.  In short, I feared my career in research would be a short one if I couldn’t demonstrate that a designer could provide core value to any phase. Along the way, I’ve made some discoveries about the
role of design in research, and I found some unexpected opportunities emerge.

In my talk, I will address the role(s) of design in research (using my own work to provide illustrative examples). I will talk about what makes research a different kind of venue for design, some lessons learned and adaptations I’ve made not only to my design skill set but
also to my own set of expectations.  I hope to provide a perspective that will help designers understand how they can contribute on any level of research.


Tuesday, August 16:
Michael Smyth, Napier University, Edinburgh
Artefacts, Places and Interaction Design


Wednesday, August 17:
Nicole Schadewitz, School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Interaction and Interface Design Patterns for Intercultural Collaboration (mini-workshop)

An introduction to the concept and applicability of design patterns in general, which is followed by a hands-on workshop about using interface and interaction design patterns effectively in design assignments will give the participants of the summer academy another interpretation of
the topic “designing the future experiences of the past”. Design patterns are solutions to a concrete design problem in a certain context. They capture reoccurring, good design solutions of the past to inspire and generate new design solutions for the future. The workshop involves two exercises
1.) a group discussions about the usefulness and usability of a set of given patterns and
2.) a brainstorming session about a good pattern of collaborative work found in the context of the summer academy.