Russell Reflects: Having fun, or taking professional development Opportunities

Browsing the HCI conference website, I was struck by a few tutorials as particularly interesting, offering good opportunities for HCI professionals and academics alike to learn something useful. It’s worth browsing them to see what takes your fancy, but the tutorial experience at HCI is a worthwhile one, in my experience – fun, engaging, a great opportunity to meet people, and some serious depth in a subject which usually gives you something significant to take away at the end of the day as well.


--More Effective Iterative Project Management--
Given by experienced workers in the field, this covers the critical area of managing the delivery of a project in an appropriate manner thsat is sensitive to HCI issues. Exercises and mini-practicals support the integration of the practice tips into methods, consistent with the theory. Participants’ IPM effectiveness, as either managers or as team members, is expected to increase as a result of attending this tutorial – what more can you ask for?!

--How to use design games to create engaging personas--
“Both companies and research communities call for collaborative work practices and user-centred approaches in various design fields. This tutorial concerns using the creation of personas as a means for the design team to learn about intended users and the contexts of use and hereby creates a common understanding of the development task. The overall learning objective is to give the participants various hands-on experiences with creating and working with personas.

The tutorial includes two different approaches for creation of personas that both are grounded in field data. In one approach the field data is ethnographic inspired video-recordings, and personas are created while playing a design game including video-snippets and images from the field. The other approach is a step-by-step framework describing what it requires to create engaging personas, which enables the reader to identify with the persona, and use it actively in the design work. The field data used has primarily been questionnaires and/or interviews with intended users.”

Whilst being important and a good basis for scenario-based design, the thing I like about this tutorial is that it looks like being great fun.

--Cognitive Factors in Design: Basic Phenomena in Human Memory and Problem Solving--
Another fun one – games and experiences to understand basic human capabilities and limitations – but then to take this knowledge and use it to inform design decisions and to understand some of the wider aspects of HCI. It also aims to provide a basis for self-directed study in the field, and to assist educators with exercises, teaching materials and so on to make teaching others about this topic more entertaining and successful. Again, the tutorial offers something for both the practitioner and the academic.

I’d encourage you to sign up and attend at least one tutorial – it’s a great extension to the conference experience, and often one of the most valuable focused days you can spend. Which one will I be attending? Actually, none of these ones – but that’s because I’m planning to attend the HCI Educators’ one!

Associated Link: HCI 2005

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