| Friday 2 May Judy Robertson (Lecturer in Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University). Title: The story of Adventure Author: software to support the creative process. In this seminar I will describe progress on the Adventure Author project. The aim of the project is to develop software to support 10-14 year old children throughout the process of making their own computer games. I will present a model of the creative process of game development, drawn from creativity theory and observation of learners before describing how our software supports different stages in the process. You will have a chance to brain storm ideas in the Fridge Magnets feature of the application and comment on the feature for self, peer and teacher assessment. I'll finish up with some thoughts on research methods for working on this sort of project. |
| Friday 23 May Pete Gale (Head of User Experience, Cogapp, Brighton). Title: Understanding Users' Engagement with Online Health Information. Abstract: Pete Gale is Head of User Experience at Cogapp, a Brighton-based company that grew out of COGS over 20 years ago. They specialise in user centred design, usability, information architecture and user experience research for web-based, mobile and other interactive applications. Their established clients are public sector bodies, museums, broadcasters, education suppliers, publishers, online start-ups, charities, health care organisations and larger corporates. They include Manchester United, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the British Museum, the BBC, HSBC, the Natural Environment Research Council, the National Portrait Gallery, the Home Office and many smaller organisations. Pete will be talking about his current work with the Arthritis Research Campaign and Macmillan Cancer Support explaining the approach to user experience employed and the particular issues that these health-related projects have in common. |
| Friday 6 June David Frohlich (Director of Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey and Professor of Interaction Design) Title: Writing with my phone: Explorations in audiovisual information sharing for non-literate communities in the developing world. Abstract: It is widely assumed that the internet is a global information resource. This is not true. For many people in the poorest parts of the world the internet is both technically and psychologically inaccessible to them, through lack of infrastructure, money and the requisite forms of textual and computer literacy. The EPSRC /StoryBank/ project has been tackling some of these issues by using the fast-growing infrastructure of mobile telephony to support an alternative form of information sharing in pictures and sound. Based in the Indian village of Budikote and inspired by developments in audiophotography and mobile imaging, we have been exploring the possibility of semi-literate communities using the cameraphone as a new kind of pen and paper for creating and sharing audio-visual stories. In this talk I will outline the design and rationale behind the StoryBank system, and report the findings of a two month trial, in which 137 stories were recorded on 10 phones and shared on a situated village display. Further details of the Storybank project can be found at: http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/storybank/index.php |