User Designer

During the week I was at the first Irish Human Computer Interaction Conference (IHCI) in the University of Limerick in Ireland. Thanks to Luigina Ciolfi and members of the Interaction Design Centre (IDC) for organising it and thanks to Liam Bannon for chairing the event.

The purpose of the conference was to bring together researchers and practitioners involved and interested in Human Computer Interaction in Ireland. There was a great turn out with lots of interesting presentations. I’m not sure of the exact numbers but there was around 40 people from all over Ireland.

I think one of the really pleasant surprises for everyone was finding out about the amount and diversity of HCI research going on in Ireland. For example Hyowon Lee talked about the research into interfaces for interacting with large collections of videos and images at the Centre for Digital Video Processing in DCU. Aphra Kerr from NUI Maynooth talked about some of her research into digital games and also touched upon some of the fascinating work they’re doing in the School of Sociology, e.g. social networks, etc. John McCarthy, Ian Pitt, Niamh McNamara and numerous others from Cork talked about research into People and Technology, Auditory/Speech Interface Design, Educational Game Design and Usability Evaluations. The IDC people gave overviews on some of their contributions to Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Auditory Displays, Haptic Interfaces and Software Development Tools. We also heard from TCD’s Gavin Doherty who talked about Games for Mental Health and Speech Interfaces. There was lots more interesting work presented but I’m not going to try and stuff it all into this post.

One of the talks that struck a strong chord with me was Mark Magennis’ presentation about what they do in the NCBI Centre for Inclusive Technology, where they work towards helping make the information society accessible to all.

Of course I babbled about my own work (view slides) on haptics, spatial cognition, information visualisations, embodiment and helping people with colour blindness or low visual acuity see complex visualisations.

As part of the conference there were discussions about what next for the HCI community in Ireland. There’ll definitely be a IHCI 2008 and over the next few months there’ll be a number of other initiatives including a mailing list, workshops, networking and educational events, etc. As I hear about them I’ll post about them on this blog.

Update: There’s a new wiki for carrying on the discussions at http://www.idc.ul.ie/idcwiki/index.php/IHCI_SIG