Congradulations to Kirsten Sadler 08.04.2008

Kirsten Sadler has recently become the proud mother of a little boy, well actually rather a big boy, wieghing in at 4kg with ginger hair. The healthy and happy boy is named Griffin (buttery), Griff for short, born 6.30am Friday morning on the 9th November.

Astrid’s new teaching post in Ghana 08.04.2008

Astrid has left us! Well she can never really leave IDWoP. But she has taken a job as Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of Ashesi University College (www.ashesi.edu.gh), Accra, Ghana. She is teaching HCI and Software Engineering to computer science and MIS (management information systems) students, and Design to all students as part of the liberal art core. Others part of her job include developing research projects, generating research funding, supervising student projects and liaise with local
businesses in her areas of interest and expertise! And she is finishing off her phd as well.
These of us still in town miss her but wish her wonderful things in her new job and new home.

Paper accepted to ASWEC2008 conference 06.12.2007

Julia will be presenting a paper on software developers' work practices at the Australasian Software Engineering Conference in Perth, 26-28 March 2008, written with Toni Robertson and John Leaney. This type of approach using ethnographic techniques is a rarity in this field dominated by research into tools and process improvement. JP & LL

Two papers accepted to DeSForM2007  06.12.2007

Two papers on designing for the experiential, moving body and experiential bodily knowing in interactive technology design were presented at the 3rd workshop on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 12-13 December 2007. Astrid presented on behalf of her co-authors, Toni Robertson and Jenny Edwards, on experiential bodily knowing. Lian submitted an entertaining video presentation for her paper with Toni Robertson on making strange with the falling body in interactive technology design. JP & LL

Paper accepted to DUX07  06.12.2007

Penny's work at design agency Digital Eskimo focuses on experimental design research in creating ground-breaking social design projects. This was the subject of her presentation "Engaging with stakeholders: Mobile Diaries for Social Design" , at DUX07, 5-7 Nov, 2007. JP & LL

IDWoP at CHI 2007  26.03.2007

A/Prof Toni Robertson will be travelling to CHI 2007 in San Jose, CA in April to participate in the workshop "Exploring Design as a Research Activity". Abstracts of participants' papers are available on the workshop website. ATL

Tea...To Think With  09.01.2007

IDWoP has now launched a new line of thankyou gifts for all our wonderful study participants. We not only have delicious chocolates wrapped in our beyond human-chocolate interaction usability heuristics, e.g. Eat Chocolate Iteratively. We also have Kirsten's Mum's Internationally Acclaimed Tea (instead of Tools) to think with. The tea is an amazing organic concentration tea to help us all finish our PhDs.

Spatiali-tea, temporali-tea and motili-tea are the essense of embodied human subjectivi-tea, Merleau-Pon-Tea KS & ATL

Paper Accepted for TEI'07 in Baton Rouge, USA  06.12.2006

Astrid Twenebowa Larssen, Toni Robertson and Jenny Edwards have a paper accepted for the first conference on Tangible & Embedded Interaction in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (TEI'07). The title of the paper is "The Feel Dimension of Technology Interaction: Exploring Tangibles Through Movement and Touch". KS & ATL

OzCHI'06 is over for another year  25.11.2006

IDWoP was heavily involved in the organisation of OzCHI this year, with A/Prof Toni Robertson chairing the conference, two short papers and several student volunteers. This year's OzCHI was one of the biggest ones yet, with about 225 registrations, and three excellent keynote presentations by Genevieve Bell, Donna Maurer and Bill Gaver. See OzCHI'06 for more details. KS & ATL

Kirsten Sadler presenting at MobileHCI'06 & NordiCHI'06  09.09.2006

Kirsten Sadler is travelling to Scandinavia to present two papers ""It's Always There, It's Always On": Australian Freelancer's Management of Availability Using Mobile Technologies" at the MobileHCI conference in Espoo, Finland, and " "Balancing Work, Life & Other Concerns: A Study of Mobile Technology Use By Australian Freelancers" at the NordiCHI conference in Oslo, Norway. KS

A/Prof Robertson presenting at PDC in Italy  01.08.2006

A/Prof Toni Robertson is presenting the paper "Designing an Immersive Environment for Public Use" at the PD conference in Trento. Italy. She is also co-chairing the Doctoral Consortium. LL & ATL

Tim Mansfield "out in the cold"  13.06.2006

Dr Tim Mansfield, ex-DSTC researcher, stars in The Sydney Morning Herald's article in "Next". This articles chronicles the closure of the co-operative research centres, initiated in 1991, due to withdrawal of government funding, and has resulted in the loss of jobs for 270 researchers. LL

OZCHI in Sydney, da na-na na!  13.06.2006

This year's OZCHI conference, 20-24 November 2006, is being chaired by Toni Robertson from the University of Technology Sydney, and IDWoP is running the social committee. OZCHI 2006 is about how we do human-centred technology design. Please go to the official website for further details (OzCHI'06). LL

Congratulations to John Leaney for long service award  13.06.2006

John Leaney was honoured at the ASWEC 2006 conference dinner with a long service award for his dedicated commitment to ASWEC, and research and practice in the Australian software engineering community. LL

Congratulations Julia on DA!  24.05.2006

Julia Prior presented her research on "Software development practice: so what do software developers do every day?" for her doctoral assessment. Her work is contributing to a growing area of ethnographic studies of everyday work practices of software developers in order to better understand software development as situated action, and to inform theory from actual practice. LL

Ethnographies of Code:  Computer Programs as the Lived Work of Computer Programming  23.05.2006

Julia Prior attended this workshop held at Lancaster University, UK, on 30-31 March 2006. Her PhD research focuses on the everyday work practices of software developers, and she presented a paper 'Programming infrastructure and and code production:  an ethnographic study' which discusses the intertwining and inseparability of the phenomena of program code and the infrastructure used to produce it.  Julia felt tremendously privileged to attend as it was a wonderful and unique opportunity to meet and interact with other ethnographers, software developers and software engineering researchers, and hopefully some of these will grow into fruitful and long-term research relationships.  Prominent researchers in software engineering and ethnography who attended include Lucy Suchman, Elin R Pederson, Ian Sommerville, Tom Rodden and Adrian Mackenzie. The workshop papers will be available online shortly, but in the meantime, the list of papers can be viewed at: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/projects/ethnoandtesting/workshop/ LL

OZCHI star is rising  9.12.2005

We're back from a very successful OZCHI conference in Canberra. Our own Toni Robertson stepped up to accept the Gitte Lindgaard Award for the best long paper and presentation, Emerging Research Methods for Understanding Mobile Technology Use, Penny Hagen, Toni Robertson, Melanie Kan and Kirsten Sadler. The research in the paper is part of an ARC Discovery Project. As part of the award, the paper will be revised for publication in a special edition of the Australian Journal of Information Systems. Download the paper from here. IDWoP was also represented by two other papers at the conference and Toni was again one of the academic respondents in the Doctoral Consortium. She also accepted the baton for next year's OZCHI, which is to be held in Sydney - with IDWoP volunteering to be the Social Committee! LL

Apple University Consortium  6.12.2005
Another IDWoP conference appearance September 2005.
Gerhard Bachfischer was travelling down to Tasmania this spring for the Apple University Consortium Developer Conference titled "Evolution of the Species". He presented a paper co-written with AProf Toni Robertson ("From Movable Type to Moving Type - Evolution in Technological mediated Typography") outlining the emergence of the "New Reader", who is at the same time reader in a classic sense but also viewer of a typographic performance and finally user of technological mediated typography. The presentation showed how important the linking between different disciplines can be. For further details see the IDWoP paper in the conference proceedings. GB

Design Workshop   4.11.2005

IDWoP will be hosting a design workshop facilitated by Jacob Buur from Mads Clausen Institute, University of Southern Denmark and Margot Brereton from University of Queensland. The workshop is to be held on Tuesday, 15th November. LL

OZCHI 2005  4.11.2005

Congratulations to all the authors that had papers accepted into this year's OZCHI conference in Canberra. Toni Robertson and Lian Loke will be presenting on behalf of the other authors Penny Hagen, Melanie Kan, Tim Mansfield and Kirsten Sadler. The research work covers a bag study on mobile practice, a review of mobile methods, and movement-oriented personas and scenarios. LL

Interactive Entertainment 2005  4.11.2005

Lian Loke, Astrid Larssen and Toni Robertson have a paper on Labanotation for design of movement-based interaction accepted into this year's Interactive Entertainment conference, hosted at UTS. The research examines representations of movement in Labanotation in the context of two Sony Playstation2® Eyetoy™ games. LL

Call for Papers: Special Issue of "Personal and Ubiquitous Computing"  20.06.2005

Call for papers for a special theme issue on movement-based interaction of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. Further details on the special issue here. Submission deadline November 26th, 2005. ATL