Off to CHI2008
April 04, 2008
Tomorrow (Friday), I’m off to CHI 2008. I looked at the program and I’m a bit overwhelmed at this point, as there will be a whole lot of things going on. I’m hoping to meet some great people and see some interesting things that are happening in the HCI world. Maybe I’ll blog some about the actual content too, maybe not. I’ve been so low on blogging due to this semester being very difficult and time-eating. Part of it is that my schedule dictates that I have to get up at 7 each morning. I’m not a big fan of this, but what do you do. And there are many 14- and 16-hour days.
Today is actually a pretty typical example.
- I had my first class (interaction design) at 8:30am to 10:30am
- then a quick meeting with my design team about the current project
- 12 to 1:30 gadgets class
- pick up some things for the conference from HCI admin office and bring them to Master’s lab
- 2pm to 3pm a phonecall
- 3pm to 3:30 design user research meeting
- 3:30 to 4:30 preparing for project team meeting
- 4:30 to 6:10 project team meeting
- 6:10 to 7 preparing for user research (pick up supplies, print stuff…)
- 7 to 8 user research – we’re doing this cool design project where we have to go to people’s homes and learn about ways of family management so that we can build a smarthome device to support some aspects of that
I’m not trying to show off anything here with this calendar, I have many friends in business whose schedules I’m sure are much worse each day than this. It’s just that I’m pretty tired each night so there’s very little bandwidth left for extracurricular activities like blogging.
The up side is that I’ll be travelling for the next ten days so it’s a bit of a break from school. Even though I may have to do a little schoolwork during that time, but I’ll mostly try to avoid it. On Friday I fly Pittsburgh to DC, DC to Vienna. I land at Vienna Saturday morning, and will spend Saturday in Vienna – sort of a daytrip. It’s cool as Vienna is a very nice old European city and I also have some personal/family connections there, I was last in Vienna 18 years ago as a kid visiting my late grand-aunt, so I’ll be visiting some places related with that and generally be a tourist. And Saturday night it’s off to CHI to Florence.
I don’t think many of my readers go to CHI, but if you happen to be one of those who do, grab me for a quick chat :)
I still have to upload my Paris pictures. Darn, I could use the smarthome device that I’m making myself, getting pictures uploaded is such a hassle.
(Update: I got a question about what are HCI and CHI and what’s the distinction. H is for Human, C is for Computer and I is Interaction. They are both the same thing, just labelled differently. Originally it was CHI but then some people thought humans should come before computers. See also a previous post by Rodrigo on this).