State of the building

Down stairs is empty literally no one around. Feels strange. 

Table process

The table sounds like it is going well. The frame is up and the glass ready and the LEDs have arrived. The wood for the top is delayed but the guy doing the building is off for a couple of weeks on Holiday. I'm going to have a quick meeting on Wednesday to check on progress. 

Mean while lots of work on M801. 

Arduino Diecimila one for the shopping list.

Ok so I have done the workshop and very fun it was to.

OK so the  Arduino Diecimila is small computer with sensing inptus/outputs and you can stick the  ArduinoXbee Series2 on. The  ArduinoXbee is a wireless networking forming a mesh - true hard core ubicomp territory. All for 57-61 Euros but you need at least 2 to begin with ( the more the better ).

They also do a bluetooth one.

Very simple to do the observing the building 'buzz' project.

I'm going to keep thinking about these - If i could think of something shareable I'lll talk about it.

Observation of the day

I'm working with headphones on have been scared 3 times when people want to talk to me. 

Uist-fully.

Weirdly once the rebuttal process is over the reviews disappear.  

More on building

Another quite day it looks like. 

I went up stairs Wednesday and couldn't find a secretary (they are in a pool) let alone a academic. I understand the academics working from home but the admin staff? Well this is just likely to be another poor sample. Popped back a couple of times and gone one later.     

IET have installed their informational system + a couple have moved in.  they have nice desks.

 More signs going up on the doors trying to stop people walking thruogh the area. 

Simon says I'm at my desk more.  

Chi papers

Had a nice meeting with Yvonne and the others yesterday. General conversion about papers for Chi. Having spoken again with Paul we think that could be a good paper about the location of the new table. 

New table is to be simple but playful guide to location of people in the new building. Theory is we test it out and see how syntactical view of location applies - good sheep paper. 

Also Y. wants something quick measuring/visualising activity in building. I like notion of doing say slow trails of people + measuring network traffic+noise as an indication of how much people are present. Again I can rework this syntactically plus look at C.Raty stuff. 

More on building

I've decided to make some notes on the new building here. I've been accused of being the only one who likes the new building. I do like the labs should have a lot of fun there and I love showing them off. 

I'm working at my desk at the moment - I think the first thing I find is the quite. Most people are out of the work space so I'm almost alone ( 2 other people) in the ground floor. The space does feel too quite but I guess it is not absolutely quieter than being in a office.

I know intellectually that the building will cause people to work from home more and so should be quite silent.  As people look for adaption processes to cope with the absence of privacy they will naturally spend more time in the only place where privacy remains ( home). 

I'm guessing but I expect some coping policy will evolve - like going in on days when your sure everyone else will be in order to socialise.  

This morning did demo of the ecology of devices to Paul. He like the demo.

I had a quick meeting with P+E about the form of the new table. After meeting with Y it looks like the table should be body hight. Something you could approach and use standing up. Looks like we should go for something that can double up as both an FTIR table and a tangible one.  

I'm going to measure up the current projector for the table rather than wait for a new one. I want to make sure the vidieo cams can be used for tangible reactivsion stuff too. 

Interesting thing about the meeting was that rather than becoming more specific things became more vague. Notice the flow of events, I'm trying to build something on a new table. I wanted to do something more tangible but we are not sure what could go on in the nexus that could be used in a tangible way. So now we have a dual use. The important aspects of the interaction are Y. She wants a circular or elliptical screen so no principle location. 

In truth we have 12 weeks to built a table,write test software, create an experiment and write it up for chi. P talks about doing something more longitudinal, but no one is sure what. At this moment my purpose is to create a boundary object. Something we can all talk about, focus the design process around.   

Y was more specific about doing a planning or tourist information thing. Something for the whole family to play with - planning a visit to MK or something. We also need something in the Nexus but what?

I still wonder if floorstickies might be more productive.  

The process is interesting - there are no clients with a problem. Very little we could apply to the standard process of human computer interaction to. Perhaps as a process this is something new. Technology creates new possibilities but how do turn those possibilities into new products. This is somewhere between the technology push and market pull. How do we identify a problem? Can we see problems when we don't have a solution?I'm not sure we can. Some perhaps, did we know we needed the internet before we had the intenet? I think we have to create solutions to see problems. 

Perhaps generally we can't - global warming is something where we see the problem with no apparent solution to guide our perception. For other things we use the affordances of the machine to guide our perceptions for what is a living difficencey.  

Could this be the start of a new strange processes.