Geeks Descend on Montréal
I recently returned from CHI 2006 in Montréal. CHI is the conference on human-computer interaction, with thousands of academics and practitioners alike swarming in attendance.
As always, the CHI experience is mostly about the networking — meeting with the many colleagues and peers scattered about at different universities and labs. If, for no other reason, CHI was a tremendous success. As for the technical program, however, there really was no session in particular that blew me away. Nonetheless, there were a few that intrigued me and gave me some ideas.
The openening plenary was given by Scott Cook, the founder and CEO of Intuit, the makers of TurboTax and Quicken. He gave a very interesting, non-academic discussion of designing for the user in his address. What interested me most, however, was when I got to speak to him afterwards. It turns out that he sponsored a scholorship at Lawrence University that, at least in part, helped put me through college! Apparently, his parents met at Lawrence, so he helped them put together this scholarship. Getting to thank him personally at this conference really made my day, and it seemed to make his, too!
There were two other sessions that stick out in my mind: the mashups plenary, and the end-user programming overview. The mashups plenary was particularly interesting because it gave me a different context in which to consider my research into The Buzz. Although I’m not doing any of the fancy buzzword-compliant stuff (Web 2.0, AJAX, etc.), I am following the basic formula for a mashup: data + tools = mashup. Since mashups seems to be a hot topic (both within and without academia), I should take a closer look at what the mashups community has to offer, and how I can contribute back to it.
The other session was the end-user programming community. In a large sense, these two sessions have a lot in common. Currently, making mashups is very much at the hands of the programmer, but mashups are all about wresting some of the control away from the initial developer (of the data or of the interface). End-user programming is all about giving those tools to the user. Cool beans.