| KAREN MARTIN |
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BIO MR. WATSON |
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01/05/09CATCH UP
If anyone has looked at this site recently they will know it was badly in need of updating. As the website for
our Ubicomp workshop is hosted here I have been motivated to do just that.
Below you will find four posts telling you of events and publications I've been
involved in since I last updated the site.
01/05/09Hybrid Design Practice Workshop, Ubicomp 09
Our proposal for a workshop at Ubicomp 09 has been accepted! It is on the subject of Hybrid Practices, focusing on play and
leisure. I am a co-organiser along with Eric Baumer (University of California, Irvine), Johanna Brewer (Frestyl), Barry Brown (University of California,
San Diego), Lucian Leahu (Cornell) and Silvia Lindtner (University of California, Irvine).
The deadline for submissions is 25 June 2009 and you can find out more on the workshop website. Here is a little abstract:
Hybrid Design Practice
The focus of this workshop is on hybrid design practices, approaches that draw on techniques from various fields to create novel methods of
inquiry. The aims of this workshop are, first, to bring together a multi-disciplinary group of practitioners and researchers to learn from one
another's expertise in choosing and evaluating methods of design practice, and, second, to discuss implications of the underlying methodologies
and epistemologies upon which these techniques are built. Participants will actively contribute to the practical focus of the workshop; we will
call for submissions detailing the practices participants leverage in their own work, from which we will select methods of research engagement
that will further shape the workshop. Through hands-on field exploration of leisure activities in the public spaces of the Disney properties,
design exercises, and brainstorming, participants will be actively involved with the application of a variety of methods to the study and
design of ubiquitous computing systems from the ground-up. By leveraging methods and guiding theories that participants commonly use in their
own work, we will explore the contrasts and intersections between the variety of approaches put forward by the participants. The goals of
this workshop, then, are twofold; first, to open up a space for reflection on current approaches towards interdisciplinary research and
design in Ubicomp, and second, to develop a new vocabulary, both practically and theoretically, for "making" interdisciplinary Ubicomp
research, thus, marking the study of hybrid design practice as an area of community-wide inquiry.
04/11/08Urban Sense Workshop
I've been doing some work with Probosics over the past months
and as a result George Roussos from Birkbeck invited me to attend
UrbanSense 08 in his place when he was unable to go. The full
title of the workshop is International Workshop on Urban, Community, and Social Applications of Networked Sensing Systems - UrbanSense08 and the
workshop was held in conjunction with ACM SenSys 2008 Conference on Embedded Networked
Sensor Systems that this year took place in Raleigh, North Carolina. I was nervous about attending as I believed that I might be out of
my depth with such a technical sounding focus. However, it turned out to be one of the most interesting and stimulating workshops I've attended.
In particular I found the work of Deborah Estrin's group at the Center for Embedded
Networked Sensing at UCLA to be very interesting as it begins to explore participation and involvement in large-scale participatory sensing.\
Thanks George for giving me this opportunity, made all the more exciting as it meant I was in the US on election night!
18/01/08Presentation at MediaCity Conference, Weimar
A paper on the in-between-ness workshops was accepted for the MEDIACITY: Situations, Practices and Encounters
Conference in Weimar, Germany. I presented the paper and had the chance to hear other people talk about their work in this field.
I enjoyed the event hugely, especially having the chance to meet and talk to Mark Shepherd and Omar Khan from the Media Architectures programme
at Buffalo. The conference was held in the original Bauhaus building and we had a chance to look round the reconstructed, and original parts of
the building. I have some pictures of this on Flickr here
26 and 27/10/07A Public (In)Convenience Workshop, Amsterdam
The third in the series of in-between-ness workshops I co-organised with Arianna Bassoli and Johanna Brewer was held in
Amsterdam in October 2007 on the theme of public toilets. Fourteen participants took part in observation, intervention, discussion and design activities
to try to understand the social, cultural and spatial role of toilets in Amsterdam. Find out more about it on the
workshop website.
27/07/07Maverick Machines Exhibition
Maverick Machines runs from 24th July to the 10th August at the Matthew Gallery, Edinburgh School of
Architecture, Minto House, Chambers Street; opposite the Royal Museum. Opening times are 10am-4pm,
Monday-Friday.
Giles Lane and I have created
a set of StoryCubes for the
Maverick Machines exhibition.
Curated by Richard Brown, Maverick Machines shows work by artists who
have been inspired by Gordon Pask, a cybernetician he worked across disciplines from learning, art,
architecture, theatre and analogue computing. Images on the StoryCubes are courtesy of Richard Brown, Paul Pangaro and Jasia Reichardt
27/07/07IEEE Pervasive Computing; Urban Computing Special
Our paper 'Underground Aesthetics; Rethinking Urban
Computing' is in the latest edition of IEEE Pervasive
Computing, an Urban Computing special. Here is the abstract:An ethnographic study and design proposal for
a situated music exchange application suggest how explicitly foregrounding the experiential qualities of
urban life can help rethink urban computing design. You'll need a login to read the article.
15/02/07Woo! New site online at last
I finally put this site online. There's no info on the projects here yet. Which some
might say is the most important part, but I'm working on it..
13/02/07CHI 2007 Submissions Update
Arianna, Johanna and I have had our experience report accepted for CHI 2007 in San Jose.
We wrote about the workshops we ran last year, 'Why Wait' and 'Betwixt' in a paper titled
'In-between Theory and Practice: Dialogues in Design Research'. We got a 5, a 4, two 3's and a 1 from the
reviewers so it could be a lively discussion.
Come and hear us.
Giles Lane and I also had a submission accepted for the
Shared Encounters workshop in which we wrote about public authoring in Urban Tapestries.
Finally, Arianna and I had our
submission to the Imaging the City workshop accepted. (Ari will go to Imaging the City, I'm going to
Shared Encounters. In case you were curious about the practicalities..)
21/11/06Shared Encounters Workshop
I've been invited to take part in the Shared Encounters workshop at CHI 2007 as a member of the programme
committee. The organisers are Katherine Willis, Konstantinos Chorianopoulos, Mirjam Struppek and George Roussos.
See the call for participation
30/10/06undersound Blogged
Our undersound project has been picked up by literally hundreds of blogs in the last week.
I was most excited by being featured in
New Scientist and
Rhizome.
16/09/06Betwixt Workshop in California
I am a co-organiser of this workshop which will explore the transitional spaces of
Orange County and consider how they are shaped by cultural practices, values and attitudes.
17/09/06Accepted for Exurban Noir Workshop
Arianna and I were accepted for this workshop with a submission called
'Exploring the In-between-ness'.The workshop is run by Ken Anderson, Eric Paulos and Amanda
Williams and participants ' will collectively undertake this challenge of understanding the relationship
between future technology comforts and social discontent.