Workshop on Sketching at Newcastle

What do you know, it's the season of workshops. On Wednesday, we had one at Culture Lab on sketching, which was organised by the INSCAPE project (funded by the EU). Bill Buxton was supposed to give one keynote (having written the influential book on sketching) but had to pull out on short notice.

The workshop nevertheless turned out to be quite interesting, with lots of different methods and perspectives being presented. Bill Gaver and Andy Boucher gave a talk on the design process (and their use of sketching within it) that led to some of the Equator systems (PlaneTracker, DriftTable), which was quite interesting as I was only familiar with the end product. I also quite liked Patrick's on video sketching (immersive video, biometric demon, Jon's VJ'ing work).

The two key points I took home were: One, sketching seems to be more of a mindset (not being too much attached emotionally to a piece of work, readiness to change something, quickness of creation, willingness to disregard certain details) than a particular technique. Two, that rather than building sophisticated tools to support the creation of sketches it might actually be more interesting to create tools that document the process of sketching. After all, some sketches do only make sense to those people that were present at the time of its creation...

Workshop on Situated Art and Dynamic Places

Last week, I co-organised a local workshop on situated art and dynamic places (in the context of the space-pace-place group). We had quite a good turn-out from a large array of disciplines (we were a bit short on the CS end of things), and both the discussions and the small group work produced some interesting scenarios/design ideas. I'm still updating the page summarising the workshop but in a couple of days, it should all be well documented here.

Dundee School of Design Degree Show

Together with Jayne, I was recently invited to attend a meeting on design(s) for counterterrorism at the School of Design at Dundee. While there I had not only a chance to meet lots of interesting people but was also able to explore the impressive degree show that they had put on for all their degrees.

There were a couple of tabletop and interactive surface systems, some fairly standard (i.e. based on Reactivision or FTIR) while some others were more innovative (at least from a technical perspective):

• 4track - a tabletop system for collaborative music making (link)
  
  This is basically a simplified version of Reactable, a bit more ludic than functional.


• absent reminders - a very beautiful mirror display using text messages (link)


• fable - an interactive kitchen table for families to share photos and stories (link)
  
  I liked the simple yet effective tracking, which was done using Processing and IR-reflective foil

There were too many projects to mention them all here. The one that I thought really stood out was the the bone project, which explores different ways to use (bovine) bones. There were examples of jewellery, containers, tiles and casings made of this material, which felt and looked quite good (and this is coming from a vegetarian).