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.