karen louise smith

The Metronauts blog site has launched. I became involved in Metronauts through my participation at bar camp style events in Toronto and Hamilton. My first posting to the site is titled Buttons bells and bike racks. I will continue to cross post here.

For the past week I have been attending the Values in Design workshop at Santa Clara University in California. The organizers and guest faculty presented on a number of design projects and design methods which are interesting and noteworthy.

• Helen Nissenbaum presented on Track Me Not, which is a Firefox browser extension which allows users to hide their search queries. Essentially the system works by sending information generated from common searches, instead of the user’s actual searches to the search engine companies. Limitations of the system are that it is in English only and functions for the US versions of the engines only.

• Tracy Fullerton and Mary Flanagan presented on game design. As an interesting methodological contribution, they showed us the Values@Play Grow-A-Game cards for use in teaching reflective and value conscious game design
• Shay David did a demo of Kaltura which is an online environment for open source video editing, interaction and collaboration

  Presentations by Paul Dourish, Geof Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, Fred Turner and many others were also excellent parts of the event.

I sent off my registration materials today for the Learning Democracy by Doing: Alternative Practices in Citizenship Learning and Participatory Democracy conference at OISE, University of Toronto. The conference runs October 16-18, 2008.

Last week during the DGPis40 conference, Nora Yong from CBC radio interviewed Ron Baecker on the multimedia biography project. For the past year, I have worked (on a part-time basis) with a team of researchers on this project. In brief, the research involves a research assistant working with a family where an individual has Alzheimer’s Disease or Mild Cognitive Impairment, to create a DVD movie of their life history. My main role has been to complete qualitative data analysis on the video data from the project. The video data set is from the ‘premiere’ and follow-up screenings with the participants.

To find out more about this work you can access the mp3 of the Spark episode. Ron’s segment is roughly the last third of the mP3.

Buses are public spaces that we can use for much more than moving between two points in a city. I came across an interesting art project today titled Trans-Regalia. Trans-Regalia was envisioned by artist Cheyenne Henry to reclaim Indigenous culture in an urban context. A description from the Reclamation Winnipeg blog is quoted below.

"Trans-Regalia is an act of Indigenous cultural and political reclamation. Artist Cheyenne Henry reclaims the public transit system in Winnipeg to launch education about urban Aboriginal issues into the public sphere. People dressed in traditional Aboriginal regalia step onto city buses and share personal stories of reclaiming their culture and identity in an urban context. The lines between participant and performer are blurred as both become viewer and viewed, sharing a common experience, a bus ride into Winnipeg's core. This act of transit reclamation opens possibilities for dialogue and understanding in the inner city."

See the Reclamation Winnipeg blog for more information.

I was in a panel today as part of the design research series at KMDI. The paper (in progress that) I presented is titled: ‘Cloudtags and talk back: Sketches from critical and digital design research practice.’ With this paper, I am interested in asserting two key ideas. First, I consider Schon’s idea of talk back in the design studio. Schon describes talk back as something communicated from the design materials to the designer. I feel this idea can be extended by considering participatory media and web 2.0 technologies where user generated content and contributions are prominent. Second, I discuss how the cloudtag’s status in the design process is fluid. Tagclouds can be a rough sketch or a 'final' design artefact. This panel and the design research series in general, grew out of a reading group. It was interesting to hear the four divergent directions we have taken with papers originating from a common body of literature.

I received an unorthodox birthday party invitation the other day. DGP is turning 40 and there is going to be a lab reunion. I am a friend of the lab and I plan to attend.

"The University of Toronto’s Dynamic Graphics Project, in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science, invite DGP alumni and friends to attend its 40th anniversary and scientific workshop. DGPis40 celebrates the 40-year history of an incredibly successful, award-winning research group that encompasses the research areas of graphics and human-computer interaction (HCI). The event will feature talks by leaders in the field (most of whom are also DGP alumni), research demos and poster sessions by alumni, students, and faculty, and opportunities for socializing and celebrating the rich history and promising future of DGP. It will bring together 125 to 200 DGP students, faculty, alumni, faculty alumni, and friends since DGP's inception."

The full conference program is available.

I have to read more carefully to find out if there will be any cake.

I registered to attend transit camp 2008 today. It is being held at MaRS on Saturday, April 5th. What should be very interesting about this camp is that it parallels an online consultation process.

This semester, I have been involved in the design research series at KMDI. Here is the abstract for the series of talks:

"Epistemologically, what do designers ‘know’? Are there ‘designerly ways of knowing’ distinct from the recognised scientific and other scholarly ways of knowing? Speakers from different disciplines will take these questions as their point of departure to explore what, for them, constitutes a legitimate knowledge claim. And, since research in knowledge media design is typically trans-disciplinary, we will also explore ways of fostering communication across disciplinary boundaries and bridging traditional epistemological divides."

The series has been successful so far and I’m looking forward to the speakers in future weeks, including Nigel Cross.

Tim Querengesser is a journalist who has been writing some important pieces about the use of cell phones to propagate hate in Kenya. In a recent Globe and Mail article Querengesser states:

"The technology has pole-vaulted many African countries beyond their crumbling infrastructure and into the information age. But it has also exposed them to risks. No other continent struggles with ethnic conflict like Africa. With SMS the preferred method to communicate (they're cheaper than calls) and with cellphone-happy Kenya now picking up the pieces after ethnic war, the potential for SMS to incite hate is coming into focus."

I have paid close attention to Querengesser’s stories because in 2005, I traveled to Kenya to visit a friend who was completing an internship in Nairobi with a human rights organization. During my holiday, my friend and I threw on our backpacks and traveled around the country.

When we arrived in Lamu, on the eastern coast I remember that two posters made a strong impression on me. The first poster was pasted to the wall in one of the streets showing how fair elections should work. In cartoon style frames, the citizen was shown arriving to the polls, casting a ballot and having her finger stamped with ink. A second poster I saw was in the post office / internet café. The image of a globe, community and connectivity was conveyed.

Querengesser’s piece reminds me that overcoming the digital divide does not necessarily address a society's other inequalities.