Dan Fitton .Com

I’m organising at workshop at CHI2012 with the other guys from the ChiCI group. Motivated by our current work on understanding cool in UK schools, which wish to explore the meaning of cool across other continents, cultures and communities with the most excellent CHI community. Full details on the workshop web site, if you’d like to attend the deadline for 4 page position papers is 1st Feb – please contact me or Janet Read for any further info.

Had some very interesting discussions and debate at a workshop organised and run by the ChiCI team at the RCUK Digital Economy All Hands Conference in Northumbria. The workshop, ‘Creating a Winning Team: Teenagers actively Participating on the Digital Economy playing field‘, focussed on teen content creation and publishing and was based around a set of personas we developed through our work with teenagers in schools. I also presented my paper on Designing with Teens (slides).

Had a great time, some great discussions and met some very interesting people from the product design community at the User Experience in Cars Workshop @ Interact 2011 in Lisbon. All proceedings available here and the slides from my (5 minute) presentation: UX in Cars Workshop Slides .

On the 5th December I’ll be giving a short invited talk at the Glasgow Cafe Scientifique about the humble Nintendo WiiMote and how it works, titled ‘Exploring the world’s most advanced interaction device: the WiiMote’.

At British HCI in Northumbria the Cool2011 workshop was a success in terms of both excellent participation and organisation of the day. Also my Planetarium Gaming interactive experience (very hastily put together promo video) generated some interesting discussion despite being a very early piece of work. Fantastic conference in terms of sessions, keynotes, posters, people and, of course, Tom McEwan’s legendary entertainment.

The digital egg and spoon race activity was run all day at the Science festival with a range of school children from 10-18, with much help from others in the ChiCI group. The activity was fun and engaging the children and prompted many questions from the adults. The highlight being meeting the legendary Johnny Ball who has recently been involved in promoting the physics of the egg and spoon race.