Welcome

After I got back from CHI and a small vacation I walked right into the end of the semester and graduation so finding time to post has been difficult until now.

I thought the student design competition poster session went well but unfortunately our team did not make it to the final round. It was really sad because we put so much work into this project. I did get a lot of comments from people after the one minute presentation of our project at the final round saying they thought our project belonged in the finals.

We submitted our project as a note to UbiComp 2008. I won't know anything about the status of our paper until June.

I spent a lot of time working as an Student Volunteer so I didn't get to see many of the things I wanted to see. I have the papers on a DVD from the conference so I'll go through and read those later.

Right now my current concentrations are on finishing up my capstone, presenting on May 22nd and job hunting. For more on my capstone status please see my capstone blog, http://www.jamiemcatee.com/blog/index.php/capstone.

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

The abstract for a paper I am working on with Professor Erik Stolterman, classmates David Royer and Selvan Thandapani was accepted to the Design Research Society 2008 conference. The paper is titled Designerly Tools and Theoretical Approaches. In this paper we are looking at the tools that designers use for design. In our case tools are defined as anything from theories to software. We are excited about this and are working on finishing up the paper by the April 1 deadline.