In a few hours I’m off to Berkeley for Creativity and Cognition 2009 to participate in the Graduate Symposium. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ben Shneiderman, Jane Prophet and my advisor Ernest Edmonds will be among the speakers. I’m quite excited about the whole thing… updates to follow, or see my twitter feed in the meantime.
Archive for the ‘conferences’ Category
Creativity and Cognition 2009
Monday, October 26th, 2009SIGGRAPH 2009
Thursday, August 6th, 2009Despite United “Airlines” best efforts to prevent my attendance I’m at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans, and twittering about it. And I just ran into the inimitable Ian Bogost, who was just visiting us in Sydney. Now try to tell me that geography still means what it used to mean.
OZCHI 2008
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008Quite a cohort from CCS went to OZCHI this year. It was my first, and I got a pretty good overview; I presented a paper, attended a workshop and participated in the Doctoral Consortium. That last was particularly excellent. Paul Dourish, Margot Brereton and Wally Smith generously gave their time to help a roomful of PhD students make a little more sense of our personal maelstroms. All of them helped me considerably. I cite Paul rather a lot, and I’m kind of a fan so that was a buzz as well.
Naturally I twittered constantly, so my stream-of-consciousness impressions of OZCHI 2008 are archived for eternity, along with everyone else’s.
Run out of TEDTalks?
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008pop!tech has been doing the podcast thing since TED was still a stodgy old chatham-house confab. Copy and paste this URI into iTunes (or whatever it is you like to use on your custom-built Slackware rig) – don’t use the phobos link that iTunes will give you, it’s no good.
Design Transformations at CHI 2008
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008I arrived in Florence last week fairly alert, considering the time difference from Sydney. I’d done the right thing and stayed awake for the last 20 hours of the flight, crashed at my hotel on arrival in the evening and got a good 10 hours sleep before the opening plenary.
It was worth it. I hadn’t heard of Irene McAra-McWilliam (Head of the School of Design at the Glasgow School of Art) before but I’m a fan now. Her speech was uplifting. She wove a tapestry of design history and theory, to come elegantly to the conclusion that designers in a connected world have a responsibility to enable others; to come to some problems not with a solution but with a box of tools.
This is just what I hope to do with my research into creativity support tools, and it’s what I’m seeing in my studies of creative place. I don’t need to design the perfect virtual studio; I need to design an environment with the right parts and the right affordances, to enable inhabitants to configure the perfect studio for their task.
TED: Bjorn Lomberg spins and spins
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Bjorn Lomberg’s TED talk was so chock-full of basic errors of logic that I could only stand to listen to about half of it.
TED: Phil Borges
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Phil Borges started his talk with the same abysmal fact that Wade Davis did: out of the 6,000 languages on earth when we were young, 3,000 are no longer being taught to children. Great stories, beautiful photos. Note: tell people mostly what you found out, not what you did, because the former is probably more interesting.
TED: Wade Davis on cultures at the far edge of the world
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Wade Davis’ talk was fascinating. Note: consider ideas of creativity, place and creative place that are outside the western enlightenment tradition. Also consider the usability principle of designing for impairment; note that some users may be creating in non-standard brain states; using DMT for example.
Creativity from users
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008I tend to think about creative communities thriving in a demanding milieu; like Shakespeare’s community of playhouses around the Globe. In this TED talk, Charles Leadbeater reminds us that users themselves are creative; citing for example the user-driven collaborative invention of mountain bikes and the telephone conversation.
IE2007 Now
Monday, December 3rd, 2007I’m at IE 2007 in Melbourne, and so are Damski and Yusuf and Christy Dena and a number of other people. I have so far enjoyed listening to Troy Innocent, who appears to be making something with resonances of Jaron Lanier’s post-symbolic communication and Leibniz’s Universal Character. And I’ve been very happy to both listen to and converse with Bruce Joy from Vastpark, who is several kinds of clever. And just this minute I’ve been regaled by Christian McCrea and am enjoying a ramble by Darshana Jayemanne on the Nonsense of the Aura. Lots of goodness here 
