Around the World in 90 Days

A quick update on some of the things I've been up to in the last few months:

• At the beginning of February I attended the Interaction 12 conference in lovely Dublin. My storify notes of the days are here, and the Johnny Holland reports I was part of are also available. Some of the standout talks for me were Genevieve Bell (if only to marvel at how strong her Aussie accent is after years in the States at Intel!) and the real life manic-pixie-geek girl Arial “f**king teddy bears in space!” Waldman on how science needs hackers. I also did a redux for this event at the local Interaction Tyneside meetup.
• Over Feburary and March I attended a series of talks at Northumbria University on design research through practice, and took notes on Jayne Wallace's jewllery projects with families dealing with dementia, Steve Gibson on spatial DJing and Grant Theft Bicycle, Stuart Walker on sustainable design models, and Ben Singleton on the tricksy craftiness of designers blindly ignored when it comes to service design and participatory methods.
• I was given the wonderful opportunity in April to go home and present some of my PhD research so far at the DesForM conference in Wellington. (And have a late birthday celebration with my family, yay!) I was really impressed by the case studies backed up with solid research (I really do think that Philips should be doing more industry conferences as well as academic ones) and loved Phillip Beaseley's talk even if my jetlag and his soothing Canadian accent did work against my fully appreciating it (luckily it's on Vimeo). My slides are available (as are the proceedings), and alongside my (you guessed it) storify streams of the event there are some great online articles (and not just because I get mentioned in both) covering it.
• Finally, over the course of this year I have covered a few talks at the local Design Interest meetup, and in May I actually did one! If you're interested what on earth a PhD in Design is about (or even how long it takes), my slidedeck is available on slideshare.

Whew! I'm taking a step back from most industry related events (including livetweeting!) and sideprojects for the next few months in order to focus on my studies. For those that are interested head over to my semi-blog about it, Aesthetics of Touch.