Puuh… well I personally found it great. One exciting thing for me was the difference between high technology in the conference halls on one side and the historic flair of the old town of Florence on the other hand. That was quite impressing for me.
First I wanted to mention that I describe my personal view of the CHI and this will be seen through a designers glasses. So I am not a scientist, not a student or teacher, nor am I working for Microsoft or Google Research.
For me the CHI is the best place where you can discuss with interaction designers from all over the world (except the vienna IXDA scene – CURE, wienweb and Keith Andrews kindly excepted ;). And you have the chance to meet the guys from Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, … and discuss with them. And that is really great.
Ok, first I wanted to start with a quick overview. The trends as I saw them …
- Mobile Devices, Touchscreens (and Maps)
- Multiuser Solutions
- Social Networks
- Data Analyzing
- and a bit of Agile
So far, so good. Quite exciting also was a presentation of Bill Buxton and Saul Greenberg (University of Calgary) named Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful.
Very free and short summarized: “… Usability Evaluation is good to
find out what the current situation is about. But we also need methods
to find out what the future of interaction designs can be…” This
paper was very controversial and the hall quite full. These are the
slides:
to be continued …