panel: spot basement theatre
Street Computing
chair: Stephen Viller
Panelists: Margot Brereton, Paul Dourish, Dan Hill, Bill Moggridge, Christine Satchell
The urban street is bathed in a sea of data, and augmented by numerous computational components: mobile phones, weather sensors, digital bus timetables, surveillance cameras and so on. The urban street is also densely populated, buzzing with life twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. These traits afford many opportunities, but they also present many challenges: traffic jams, smog and pollution, stress placed on public services, and more. Computing technology, particularly the kind that can be placed in the hands of citizens, holds much promise in combating some of these challenges. Yet, computation is not merely a tool for overcoming challenges; rather, when embedded appropriately in our everyday lives, it becomes a tool of opportunity, for shaping how our cities evolve, for enabling us to interact with our city and its people in new ways, and for uncovering hidden, but useful relationships and correlations between elements of the city. This panel brings together an international array of speakers to help critically analyse the challenges and possibilities that emerge as urban data is made available to ordinary citizens on an unprecedented scale.
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panel: ICT theatre 1
Design and Design Process
chair: Greg Ralph
What is the balance between creating something in a stroke of genius, and following tried and proven methods and processes? In many industries there exists a tension between the designer who relies on their instinct and intuition to solve a problem and those who rely only on a predetermined sequence of steps to ensure that all necessary aspects have been explored. This panel will look at whether there is a difference between these two styles of design in user experience. For students of experience design, is it necessary to have that creative 'flair' to develop a good design? Or can students be taught to follow a known sequence of research, design and validation and be ensured of ending with a design that people want to use? Where should priorities be placed during training to ensure students of design graduate with the required skills to be able to develop meaningful designs? Should students be assessed on the final product they submit, or on the process they followed to get there? In many other industries, the same tension exists. Can you be good architect if you have a grand vision but no understanding of building materials or traffic flows? Can you be a good photographer by understanding and controlling light, film type and aperture but possesing little visual flair? By bringing together practitioners from multiple industries, this panel will explore the tension between these two design approaches within these industries as well as how other industries manage these differences. User experience designers will be able to hear how others before them have handled these questions, and what areas of study served them best once they entered the workforce.
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