Welcome

I am excited to be leaving for CHI on Thursday but I have a lot of preparation to do before then. My team is pretty much ready to go. We have our poster printed and we are working on some additional items. We are also submitting our project to the Ubiquitous Computing conference in Korea this year. That paper is due Friday but we finished up the first draft that is 90% where we want it to be.

I have to get a large amount of writing done for a class project and paper that I am working on with some friends. The deadline is before I get back from Italy so I want to make sure I have contributed as much as I can to this project.

It has been a rough last couple of weeks with a bunch of user testing and setting up for a user test going on but things are starting to settle a little now. I feel better about being able to get enough done that I won't feel like I had to work at CHI. I did this last year and it was really difficult.

I am looking forward to meeting the other teams in the Student Design Competition. It should be exciting.

It was really interesting to find out that one of the possible job titles I could have is one Fast Company considers to be a job that people don't realize they want.

I especially liked this part of the article. "Although many interaction designers have advanced degrees in design, such a background isn't a prerequisite, says David Fore, head of consulting services at Cooper, a pioneering interaction design firm. Fore previously worked as a reporter for industry publications -- valuable experience, given that interaction designers' research requires "the skills of a reporter and an anthropologist," according to him."

I have the skills of a reporter because of my background in the field and I have learned a number of things about studying people in my two years as a master's student.

Here is a link to the page with the interaction designer description, http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2008/01/ten-jobs.html?page=0%2C2.

The full article
http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2008/01/ten-jobs.html?page=0%2C0