Here’s a few of my own highlights from DIS 2012 sessions that I attended…
At the seams: DIYbio and Opportunities for HCI (Stacey Kuzentesov, Alex S. Taylor, Tim Regan, Nicolas Villar, Eric Paulos): Fascinating look at issues facing the DIY Biology including community, materials management, ethics, etc. Some good examples about how interaction design might have a role in supporting the DIY Biology community.
How Learning Works in Design Education: Educating for Creative Awareness Through Formative Reflexivity (Katheryn Richard, Haakon Faste). How traditional principles of good education break down when applied to creative design education.
Reflective Design Documentation (Peter Dalsgaard, Kim Halskov). System for design documentation, this time thinking about how this could be useful to researchers who do research through design. Very thoughtful, particularly during the Q&A.
Framing, Aligning, Paradoxing, Abstracting, and Directing: How Design Mood Boards Work (Andrés Lucero). Mood Board 101: what are the benefits to using them, what can interaction design borrow from this practice that’s common in industrial design, fashion design, textiles, etc.
Understanding Participation and Opportunities for Design from an Online Postcard Sending Community. (Ryan Kelly, Daniel Gooch). Nifty short paper about the life and times of http://www.postcrossing.com/
Exquisite Corpse 2.0: Qualitative Analysis of a Community-based Fiction Project (Peter Likarish, Jon Winet). Nifty short paper about crowdsourcing a novel line-by-line over twitter, looking at how the narrative is being constructed and managed in a lightweight, distributed medium.
Experiences: A year in the Life of an Interactive Desk. (John Hardy). One computer science researcher’s reflection on spending a year living and working on an interactive desk. Brought up lots of longitudinal issues that realistically must be considered if interactive work environments are going to be supported in the long run.
… Oh, and, if you’re still curious about that “cool bit of electronics” that came with the conference nametag, it turns out it’s part of Tom Bartindale‘s to-be-published research project at Newcastle University’s Culture Lab. The board has an IR transmitter that is picked up by the cameras at the conference that are recording talks and interviews with authors. This metadata of ‘who’s on camera?’ allows videographers to search through stacks of footage and find clips with particular subjects.