TEI’09

This should have been a live-blogging experiment. I wanted to blog about what I see and hear at the Tangible & Embedded Interaction (TEI) 2009 conference in Cambridge, UK from 16.-18. February 2009.
However, the hotel wifi did not cope that well with 170 computer scientists and designers. Thus, I've only covered part of the first day (see below). For a more complete report see Christian Zöllner's blog.

Like Christian I absolutely enjoyed the conference. The mix of designers, psychologists and computer scientists is pretty awesome. I've come back from TEI with a lot of new ideas and contacts. While TEI is a lot smaller and less prestigious than CHI, it is much more inspiring and useful.
Besides the talks there was a whole day of demos. That was absolutely necessary because there were over 30 of them, ranging from cool art projects over tabletop interfaces to sensors and frameworks. There was no "Best Demo Award" like at other conferences because it is simply impossible to decide what's the best out of such a wide range of demos.

Next year's TEI will be from 25.-27. January 2010 at the MIT Media Lab. Unlike the previous conferences, TEI'10 will also offer 'studios', real hands-on workshops for playing with electronics and other cool stuff. The submission deadline is somewhen in August 2009.

There was also some discussion whether to change the conference title from "Tangible & Embedded Interaction" to "Tangible & Embodied Interaction". An informal vote about the name did not show a significant trend towards one term or the other. I prefer the original name because "Embedded" feels more connected to hardware hacking than "Embodied". However, it's the community that makes TEI what it is, not the name.

Day 1 Log

Tom Igoe's Keynote

..was about the ecology of embedded computing.

• http://technology.open.ac.uk/eeru/staff/horace/kbpotl.htm
• http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/anya-kamenetz/green-friday/real-cost-e-ink
• http://dev.eyebeam.org/projects/reware/blog
• each hardware project should release information necessary for recycling (materials, chemicals used, etc.)
• http://www.epeat.net/
• http://www.wattzon.com/

There were not that many questions after his talk – I think that most people need some time to think about this issue.
The slides will be available online.

Session 1
(…)

Session 2

Jörn Hurtienne et al. – Sad is Heavy and Happy is Light – Population Stereotypes of Tangible Object Attributes

• metaphors for object attributes
• they used Lego parts for their user study 🙂
• big-small
• bright-dark (metaphors only really work with black/white, not with different shades of the same hue)
• light-heavy
• smooth – rough

Ayah Bdeir's Talk

• Arabiia – a cool belly dancer's dress that transforms to a burka
• great hardware prototyping toolkit: http://www.littlebits.cc/

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Posted by Raphael Wimmer on February 16, 2009

https://raphaelwimmer.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/tei/