Earlier this month, I had the chance to go to Florence to attend the 2008 CHI conference. I had been looking forward to CHI for several reasons: After being disappointed by HCII last year, I was hoping for a more practitioner-oriented conference; I knew that a lot of people I knew would be going; I had been involved in the review process; and I wanted to (finally) go to Italy. Speaking of Italy: I've still got that "Florence, Idddallly" sound in my ears, and it'll take a while to wear off.

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Yesterday I got an email telling me that I was invited to an acquaintance's birthday party, together with some 30-odd people, most of which I didn't know. The email contained an .ics invitation as an attachment, one of these little files created by, for example, MS Outlook or Apple iCal. The .ics file carries information on a calendar entry in it, like time, location, sender, attendees etc.

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This year's CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) conference will take place from 5 to 10 April 08 in Florence, Italy. They are expecting ~2000 attendees from 38 countries. I've always enjoyed going to CHI conferences – they offer a unique blend of current research and topics that are more geared towards practitioners. You can still get the early bird rate if you sign up before Feb 10! For me, there was one big disappointment with this year's CHI, even before the conference started: I was asked to be on the program committee for a workshop: "Now Let's Do it in Practice: User Experience Evaluation Methods in Product Development". I reviewed four papers in my spare time. Now it turns out that the CHI organizers assigned so small a room to the workshop that a maximum of two authors per paper can attend – and the reviewers cannot take part in the workshop. Quite frustrating.

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Check out this video on "Android", Google's open source mobile phone OS. Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and President, Technology, and Steve Horowitz, Engineering Director, explain and demonstrate some of the amazing features of the new platform.

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November 8 saw this year's worldwide No. 1 usability event – the World Usability Day, conceived by the international Usability Professionals Association (UPA) and carried out in 23 countries by local UPA chapters or other interested parties. I took part in the event in Hamburg, Germany, which attracted over 300 people from industry, administration, and academia. My invited talk on Google User Experience was the final element of this great and well organized event and was very well-received by the approximately 150 people in the audience. Exciting!

In his article, "Design Vs. Design Thinking", Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum offers some great insight into the current struggle between business schools, design schools, designers and business people around who actually defines "design thinking" and what "design thinking" actually is supposed to mean:

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Check it out – use this fun test to see which part of your brain is dominant. Amazing!
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22535838-5012895,00.html

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There's a great slide show by Jan Miksovsky on dialogs and how the users perceive them … inspiring!
http://www.slideshare.net/blider/designing-around-dialogs