Politiken today has a small article about some of the teachers at the Danish Design School. They are complaining about current changes at the school: right now attempts are being made to make the Design Education more theoretically oriented. This involves hiring actually researchers to do design research - and fyi (because they dont mention that in the article) it has involved setting up a Center for Design Research, at which my former colleague and co-author Ida Engholm is now employed. Digital design is supposed to be part of the research field - Ida's ph.d. actually delt with the history of webdesign.

Design research is needed to change the design education into something more "business" friendly, claims the head of the Design School. It is because the students have learned to do proper design, that we are succesfully, claims the teachers of traditional "craftmanship" courses in ceramics and fashion design. They have quit their jobs, due to the ongoing changes, which means that new priorities are being made when new people are hired.

The clash between practioners and "theorists" is not unique to this environment, but perhaps more pronounced. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Politiken:"Designoprør" ("Design Revolt")

PS. The Center for Design Research hosts an opening conference on Monday September 13th. No program online.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 09:10 (0) comments

Interesting girls and gaming are reported in an article in GameDAILY.

I have tried to play one of the Nancy Drew games, mentioned in the article. A pretty conventional mystery/adventure game, in my opinion, with no weapons and the possibility to get a lot of moral support on the phone from your girlsfriends. As a strategy, I'm not sure this is the way to get to a female audience. However, making a basically good game with interesting puzzles (which the games was) is always a good start for any game for any audience in this genre.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:22 (0) comments

And while we are at it (the blogger blogging about other bloggers), the Danish blogcommunity is meeting up for a huge party tonight, here in Copenhagen, with lots of attendees - and a band!. I was reminded of it only yesterday, so I'd already made other plans. But boy, would I like to be there. What better place to do serious research ;).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 18:14 (0) comments

Paeonia describes herself as a "PhD-student in Sociology, [which] botanize in both academic and civic flora. Apparently she is writing a ph.d. on weblogs. She is situated in Åbo (also known as Turku) in Finland.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 18:11 (1) comments

Somehow I think that this guy's understanding of hyperspace differs somewhat from mine. In the beginning of september, he is speaking in a Danish bookstore on "Hyperspace and global events". On his website he discusses machines which can transmit energy worldwide, so I wonder which kind of events he is thinking about...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:04 (0) comments

...The Danish Media Professionals Annual Fair September 13th. Together with Christian Badse, I will host a session on what happensNår publikum adopterer medierne (When the audience adopt the media). Link leads to the blurp. And here is my presenter profile - you can see that this conference site is made by professional media people (I think).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:08 (0) comments

According to this article over at BBC Technology, the BBC weather forecast will be using gaming graphics to portray the weather "realistically". I just love this quote:

It thinks and works a bit like a computer game," said Colin Tregear, project director at the BBC's Weather Centre.

"We are trying to take weather data and generate weather graphics on a 3D map that actually looks like the weather."

Some real weather "games":
Cloud Concentration Game
The Weather machine
DIY Weather Map
Storm Troopers
If you are member of Reading University, you can play this (note it is 5 degrees in Denmark)
# posted by Lisbeth at: 21:29 (0) comments

Lesson learned: not necessarily an optimal experience to run a department meeting on a mixture of painkillers and the after-effect of a sleeping pill. But after more than a week with not enough sleep (because I automatically wake up after 6-7 hours because of back pain, cant sleep on the back or the stomach or sidewise), I'm all for desperate measures to get some proper rest. Apparently, the increased pain should be a sign that the osteopath's treatment is working and the body is reacting strongly to this. It better be true :( - cause I really feel that my life is wrecked by pain at the moment.

# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:08 (0) comments

I'm here to bear witness to the fact that it is possible to win something in a sms-quiz. This friday I picked up a mysterious package at the post office - it turned out to be a pocketsize cookbook, written by this man. I had won the daily MetroExpress sms-quiz which I had tried to submit to while slightly bored riding the metro to work earlier in the week.

Anyway, I picked up the book and looked at it and discovered that here was a book, highly influenced by web-aesthetics (a nice example of remediation also taking affect the other way round):

1) The book has a clear "webaesthetic" quality about the typography: important words are marked in another font-colour, so you have sentences in black where a word in blue suddenly springs out at you. The blue font gives them a highly "clickable" feel (being used to as I am that differently coloured words are also a standard way of marking linked words - like on this page); the way they looked really makes me want to click on them with my fingers to see what happens. In addition, the font itself is a webpage-font style thing: no feet and suited for quick reading-browsing (narrow arial?)

2) I have never seen a cookbook so consequently uncategorical. I have tried to figure out the ordering principle behind the order of recipes but there just isn't one. They are not ordered alphabetically, nor in order of raw material (fish, poultry etc), nor by types of recipe (appetizer, dessert) or days of the week etc. Haute-couture desserts are next to fish dishes which are next to bread recipes which are next to salads - the entire thing comes across as a mass of dishes as random as what a Google search on "recipe"would present to you. It is simply a random-access recipe database.

3) The book has small extra info "links" at the bottom of the page: one is a comment on what to do with the dish later, another explains how the particular dish goes with your blood type. They are not really conventional footnotes, but exactly something you would click on to get additional info in an online version.

I should not forget to add, that seeing the book is so (unintentionally?) weblike, it is a disappointment to go to the website of the book. Nice, but no recent updates and in terms of information architecture a bit messy (the usual confusion between local and global navigation). But if you hang around long enough for the page to be updated, you should be able to buy the book with the author's signature included. It goes by the simple title mad (food)...

P.S. Tested out a recipe and tried tasting multe (grey mullet) for the first time in my life. Not bad for a fish, especially fried with curry paste, the Boserup style.

# posted by Lisbeth at: 20:12 (1) comments

It's too rare that I'm able to link to the work that my students have done. However, today two of my students defended their master thesis and got a very good grade for the academic report and presentation of the website www.boaderszone.org. They have tried to make a website which caters to the target group (the snowboarders) and the values which matters to this subculture, a website which provides a fun experience (the little "playable" 3D-surfer - note also the videoclips with him hidden in the tricks-menu), yet still has good usability. I think they have largely succeeded.

One of their inspiration sites was www.neostream.com. Another is www.hummelfashion.com.

Initially, they were much inspired by the Digital Aesthetics course at ITU, taught by my colleagues Mads & Martin. Martin has his own weblog now - www.nowuseit.com as has Mads. In fact, at least 6 researchers (Mads, Martin, Jesper, Gonzalo, TL + yours truly) or approx. 33% of my department is blogging now. Nice.

# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:06 (0) comments

Try the Olympic Game-test (in Danish) & the small sport games at the Danish Broadcast Corporation's (DR) teensite SKUM.

"This grainy picture is taken live at the burning car wreck, right before the camera owner called 911....."
Talking about teenagers, on Norwegian TV yesterday I saw the first commercial asking people to send their interesting mobile phone pictures to the TV provider. Since my intuition tells me that currently it is teenagers who own most of the mobile camphones, they must be the target audience. So now we have both "moblogging" and "mobreporting" as two new genres of "young" communication.

I wonder if live journalism will be completely taken over by the consumers in a decade or so...

# posted by Lisbeth at: 08:17 (0) comments

1) Went to an osteopath this friday. He came up with a new diagnosis to describe my back and right leg pain: he thinks Im suffering from a sacro-illac syndrome (note: link goes to a "spine university"...). The physiotherapists I have been seeing claim my pains is due to a slipped disc - so these are the "surprises" you get when you start seeing different types of specialists.

The osteopath claims he can make the pain go away with treatment and exercises I need to do. I'm placing my somewhat downbeat hope on him: the pains have persevered since January and have become worse again during the last couple of weeks. Whatever the basic cause of my back and leg pain, unpacking my office and sitting too much has not suited it well.

2) Spent huge part of the evening calculating exam numbers and exam "income" potential and making neat schems of what everybody in the department is doing of admin and org work. Enjoyed playing around with tables and Excel calculations. What's happening with me?

# posted by Lisbeth at: 23:09 (0) comments

Interesting Danish example of interactive news and background journalism on DR's theme webpage about polution. If you follow the link to DR Undervisning, you can click into 3 interactive time lines.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:25 (0) comments

I'm considering changing my focus of interest to another form of online gaming: because at pokerstars.com, a Norwegian alledgely took home a prize of almost 3 mill. Danish kr in an online poker tournament. Forget about spending hours on advancing your MMOG character and then selling it on e-bay - provided you're good at poker, it seems an enticing opportunity to enter the poker scene and by regularly playing ensuring an outcome which could make you an independant researcher for years on end...I just have to get lucky...(cf Politiken) and they have tournaments running all day 7 days at week...

# posted by Lisbeth at: 08:54 (0) comments

The article in Magisterbladet about weblogs and networking, including a brief interview with me, came out in print this weekend. They didn't have time to photograph me (the interview was done over phone) so instead of a photo of me, they brought two screenshots from this page. It was a little spooky seeing this page "stuck" to a journal page like that - in a weird way it's like the page is developing a life of its own, even when I'm not there... (Note to self: yet another incentive to do something about the layout).

This weekend I also read some newspapers and a ladies magazine. In Politiken, they had a nice pointer to a recent report of the use of IT-money in public institutions. The researchers has evaluated the "IT-maturity" of 110 public institutions by looking at their webpages. Apparently too few of the IT-resources are actually used to make the public webpages user-friendly and informative - several of the websites get a thumb down (60%). You can find the report on CBS's website.

The ladies magazine Søndag is one I normally don't buy because it is clearly targeted at an older audience than me. This week, however, one of their main articles was announced with the catchy title "Women and the Internet - these women make the net lively". So I bought it just to check out what was behind this article. It turned out that the article was about Danish women who had started their own e-compagnies online - many of them because they thought online shopping saved them a lot of time. Interesting that a magazine with a target audience consisting of women between 39-59 (whose interests according to the linked page apparently center on human interest stories, health, cooking, home and gardening) is starting to write about women entrepreneurs and IT - even if they have to use quite a lot of article space telling the readers that it is (still) not dangerous to shop on the net. One of the women mentioned has put together a huge portal listing the e-shops where busy women can shop when they don't have time to do it in real life: www.e-damer.dk. The magazine itself don't have a webpage (yet).

# posted by Lisbeth at: 19:30 (0) comments

For the cyborg-inclined, in Copenhagen, on Christiania this weekend (august 4th to 8th), the second year in a row there is an "interactive art exhibition" called Half Machine where a lot of international artists are participating, all in their way commenting on the relationship between man and machine. As you will see, if you follow their link, also they have a wiki...

Quest for the Rest - another little interactive game-world-puzzle-thing & a band-site by the maker of Samorost. By way of some of my students.

And by way of Tinka, my favourite net-test spotter. How fast do you read?
# posted by Lisbeth at: 09:59 (0) comments

I'm back again from a long and relaxed holiday - and finding myself busy with stuff like unpacking and getting sorted in my new office and taking care of some of the more urgent temp head matters. On top of this, I'm also trying to migrate to a new work computer (a lovely portable gamelabtop with widescreen) which so far it refuses to read my itu-mail. So there haven't been a lot of time to blog or research.

However, the interview about research blogs that I did with a journalist from Magisterbladet before the holiday, should be out soon in the very same journal - this week, I think. Magisterbladet is the biweekly journal for the major humanistic academics' society - quite a few Danish academics read it, and I do think it is a nice move of them to start dealing with academics and IT culture. They have interviewed Jesper Balslev as well, one of the most famous Danish bloggers. It'll be interesting to see if an interview introducing blogs like this will lead to more Danish academics blogging. More to follow.

Btw, it is an amazing experience to be in the new ITU building, in a new and more spacious office and with all my DIAC colleagues close by. It's almost like starting in a new school, there is a certain exitement about it all and I feel like I should be sharpening my pencils and be buying myself a new schoolbag in order to keep up with it all... You can actually see my office from this webcam, it's on the second floor, to the left of the big mountain of rubble. I should note, that the sound from the counstuction site is the only downside to the new location, especially on hot days like these when you have to keep the windows open in order not to be "stewed" alive.

# posted by Lisbeth at: 17:51 (3) comments