Interaction Design Group

Congratulations to Sofia Pardo, and her supervisors Frank Vetere and Steve Howard, for having her thesis passed with modest changes.

PhD candidate Florian 'Floyd' Mueller has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to spend a period of time at Stanford University studying exertion interfaces.

We have a new PhD candidate - Mitchell Owen Harrop. His research supervisors are Dr Martin Gibbs and Dr Christine Satchell. His research interests are game studies, game rules, online communities, engagement and play.

Florian 'Floyd' Mueller's 'Remote Impact' was shortlisted as one of the 11 most innovative games this year at the European Innovative Games Award 2008.

More information about Remote Impact and Floyd's current research at http://exertioninterfaces.com/remote_impact/

Christine Satchell appeared on ABC's The New Inventors from the ABC website. Well done Christine!

You can watch Chistines appearence by visting the following link http://www.abc.net.au/tv/newinventors/txt/s2372326.htm

Congratulations to Sonja (and her supervisors Frank and Berndt), who's PhD thesis, titled "Picture scenarios for representing dynamic use context in mobile design", has been passed subject to minor changes.

Greg Wadley was interviewed about online hobby communities...the interviewer mentions it in her blog: http://homepageradio.blogspot.com/2008/06/craft-communities-online.html

We are happy to have Prof. Peter Wright with us for couple of months. His research interets are user experience, scenarios, affective interfaces, assistive technology, ageing, museums and much more. Please stop by and welcom him. He is in room number 4.68.

In March '07 Steve Howard reported on his attendance at HCI 2020, a Microsoft sponsored forum that bought together "computing, design, philosophy of science, sociology, anthropology and psychology to debate, contribute to, and help formulate the agenda for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in the next decade and beyond." The final report is now available for download from: http://research.microsoft.com/hci2020/

IDG researcher Greg Wadley and artist Adam Nash play music in Second Life and at Melbourne venue Horse Bazaar on March 25, 2008. Using avatars they will play sound-sculptures in the virtual Second Life world, projecting visuals and sound into HB. Starts at 8pm, admission free. For details please see http://www.dis.unimelb.edu.au/staff/gwadley/whenworldscollide.pdf. Greg is currently researching virtual-world communication for his PhD. Adam is the Australia Council's Second Life artist-in-residence and teaches at RMIT.

Prof. Andrew Monk will be visiting us on 16-18 January 2008. If you wish to discuss you research with Andrew please contact Steve. He will be giving two presentaions in January. Visit seminar page to find out more.

To find out more about Andrew visit his websites on http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~am1/ or http://www.cuhtec.org.uk/

Frank, Hilary, Shawn(Melb Uni), Kate Thompson, David Thomas, Penny Schofield, Giselle Withers (Peter Mac) and Maria Simpson (Telstra) have been awarded a research grant by Cancer Council Australia on the project “Using Emerging Technologies to Improve Supportive Care for Young Adults Living with Cancer”. The grant is awarded under the Collaborative Cancer Support Networks Grants Program for a one year project. It is a collaborative project between University of Melbourne, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Telstra. This project aims to develop innovative strategies for supportive care for young adults affected by cancer, by exploiting emerging practice by young people of using broadband, internet and mobile telephony to forge social networks. Specifically:

• identify the psychosocial needs of young people living with cancer that can be best met by mobile and broadband-related services;
• establish new technological services that integrate existing support communities
• document best practice for using technology to support young people with cancer in a manner that is sustainable and sensitive to ethical and privacy considerations.

Frank was recently interviewed about the collage system developed as part of Intergenerational Play project.

Podcast of the interview can be seen here.

Martin appeared on The Age on the 20/11/2007, intorducing our new research direction - phatic communication.

His artcle can be found online on theage.com.au.

Stephen Smith (supervised by Steve Howard and Robert Johnston) has been awarded 2nd place (runner up) in the ACPHIS Information Systems Doctoral Thesis Award Competition for 2007 - the citation reads as follows:

"This thesis was the unanimous choice as the runner-up to best Australian Information Systems PhD for 2006/2007. It was a study of the use of technology to help consumers evaluate physical products over the internet using the experimental method. It was very tightly written and addressed a problem of great relevance to industry."

Chistine is invited as a Keynote speaker at the Making Links Conference in Sydney, Novermber 2007.

Satchell, C. 'Creating Virtual Environments that are Easily Traversable Spaces' Making Links Conference. Sydney, Nov, 2007

Christine was interviewed on the ABC on Friday 2nd Nov. Christine's piece can be found at http://www.abc.net.au/am/default.htm. Type "Christine Satchell" or "Swarm Phone" into the search box provided.

Associate Professor Mikael Skov from Aalborg University, Denmark is spending his Sabbatical with us. He will be in Melbourne from 29th October 2007 to 15th April 2008.

This week on DIS SEMINAR Series Mary Lou Maher will be presenting "The Impact of Tangible User Interfaces on Designers’ Spatial Cognition" The seminar will be held on Friday, 19th October from 11.15 a.m. – Theatre 3, Level 2, ICT Building, 111 Barry Street, Carlton. Abstract of the presentation

Mary Lou Maher is a design researcher with an interest in novel user interfaces to support designing and computer support for collaborative design; she is the Professor of Design Computing at the University of Sydney. Mi Jeong Kim is a design researcher with an interest in designers’ cognition while using tangible user interfaces; she is a PhD student in the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition at the University of Sydney.

Congratulations to Floyd, who ran the Melbourne Marathon last sturday in 3hrs and 28 min.

Members of the IDG group have been successful in the recent round of ARC Grants running from 2008-2010

Dr RB Johnston; A/Prof S Howard; Prof EA Sonenberg; A/Prof R Scheepers; Dr PB Seddon
Title: Cross Community Information Systems: Understanding Technology Practice Fit in Healthcare

Prof LS Sterling; Dr F Vetere; A/Prof S Howard
Ttitle: Socially Oriented Requirements Engineering Software Engineering meets Ethnography