North American Tour – Day 9 - The Conference Has Formally Started

These events took place on Monday 30 April, 2007

The conference formally started yesterday and since I have already done what I'm supposed to do here I just planned initially to attend some courses on what I thought would be ethnographic research. However, as I listened to the first remarks during the first conference I realized I was in the wrong place. Not because I went into a different course, but because they were "just" talking about usability and how to build more usable products, which, at this point, I don't really care about.

Because of this I had to reschedule my entire day and finished in an "interactive session" entitled "Who killed design?" which was more interesting not just because of the people talking, but mostly because of the disagreements and ramblings among them. Bill Moggridge, Bill Buxton (which happens to be an interesting character) Terriy Winograd and Meg Armstrong were in the panel.

After this I decided to go to the airport to try to sort out my situation with with my trip to Salt Lake City. I can neither cancel my flight and, apparently, nor change it. So, it seems to be that I will have to end up buying yet another ticket to make it from San Jose to Salt Lake City.

At night I was really tired but I went to the exhibition and kind of a welcome party for the conference. There were lots of stands from this famous technology companies. I was interested in inquiring about internship positions, so, as far as I can remember, I made contact with Yahoo, eBay, Google and VMWare. These companies will be recruiting today but since last night I already saw people asking questions and giving their personal cards to representatives from these companies.

I was interested in making contact with foreign researchers to try to expand my own research so I made contact with some researchers from Samsung, and some PhD students from the University of Tampere in Finland and Georgia Tech in the US. I was invited to a party from this last university on Wednesday. On Wednesday it seems to be that everyone will be organizing a party. I missed my chance of making contact with some Chinese researchers from the Chinese Academy of Science. I mean, I did talk to one of them but during the welcome party it was to noisy to actually communicate... Hope I can have a chance to talk with them again.

There was plenty of international food during the party, but I was still full from lunch (a hamburger from Johnny Rockets that wasn't that good). However, I ate some Mexican chicken fajitas. There was an international show as well with Belly Dancers, who were kind of old, Chinese music with dragon included - according to the guy from the Chinese Academy of Science that was the type of show they have during the Spring Festival... that loud music was the reason why I couldn't really talk to the guy - and Japanese drums.

I got lots of goodies from the exhibitors... and I saw Bill Buxton signing his own book, like if he were a famous author. Met Aaron Marcus as well... and took the names of several books I should read from the publishing houses that were present.

I've been told that the Mexican team from the Universidad Tecnologica de la Mixteca made it to the finals in the design competition taking place tomorrow.