It was a mixed bag of news this week on both the Bloomington Startup Weekend and CHI fronts, but the good far outweighed the bad. The sad news for my design team came in the form of mixed reviews on our own submission, one of just 40 international submissions by students willing to take on the wicked problem of designing for people experiencing homelessness. I include our three reviews with rebuttal analysis of each.
Happy Birthday, Little Man
Eight years ago, at 5:43 am, my life was permanently changed.
Traveling Patterning Shoebox
Our first traveling shoe box was inspired by Anno’s Math Games 2, a book we’ve enjoyed quite a bit, but that is no longer in print. One of the chapters is devoted to “which one is different” questions that are much more thought-provoking than those I remember from Highlights Magazine. An example would be a picture that includes several objects that are similar in color, with one that varies slightly in function.
IU sends Five to CHI … Again.
For the second consecutive year, it appears the IU School of Informatics will send five team to Florence, Italy to compete in the next round of the CHI Student Design Competition. Now in the fifth year of the event, IU has won the competition twice, placed in the top four six times, and sent a total of 19 teams to this major conference for human-computer interaction.
Bandwidth instead of Bumperwidth
The Ottawa Citizen reported last week that their city was attempting to cut costs and boost efficiency by endorsing telecommuting for some employees. Even for smaller cities like Bloomington, there is still an argument to be made in terms of environmental footprint and resource networks to encourage workers to spend less time in the physical office.
Wiiiiiiiiiiiiii!
A video of a toddler playing Wii tennis makes me ponder both what future skill sets are going to emerge in 20 years with kids growing up on the Wii … and how meaningless my own Wii success is by comparison.
TweetSpeak
AboutUs.org developer Mark Dilley passed along news about the creation of TweetSpeak, a command line program for Mac OSX that leverages the text-to-speech engine to have Twitter content spoken. I will probably keep it on. If it gets too socially awkward or intrusive, mute is only a button click away.