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.

I’ll be blogging this week (June 12-15) from DIS 2012 in Newcastle, UK.  This year’s DIS conference is actually part of a two-week conference series that also includes Pervasive 2012 and the International Symposium of Wearable Computers (ISWC 2012).

When I arrived I was very pleasantly surprised that my registration “bag” included:

•  My badge/nametag.
• A cool bit of electronics (more on this later).
• A conference program, which fit into my plastic name badge.  The reverse side has a map, for easy reference.
• A USB key with conference proceedings.
• The ubiquitous conference bag … which is actually an Onya Bag that fits into a tiny stuff sack and attaches to a keychain.
• A lanyard, to which everything is attached.

I tend to a) recycle 90% of the flyers that come in conference bags within 10 minutes; b) continually forget my conference program; and c) begrudgingly lug former conference bags to the grocery store.  Thank you, DIS 2012 organizing committee, for thoughtfully designing registration and being well-organized.

You may still be wondering about that QR code and cool bit of electronics near the bottom of my name tag.  Registration let me know that it’s being used to identify me automatically in video taken at the conference, and that it works with interactive coffee tables in the main lobby area.  I’ll do a bit more investigating on how this works and will report back soon!