Hello, this is Heesung Lee, M2 student.
I attended the Human Interface Symposium 2013 at Waseda University from 10.Sep to 13.Sep.

This is an annual symposium by the Human Interface Society.
From our Lab, Kimura, Yamamoto-sensei, Kato-sensei and me attended it.

This year the symposium’s theme was “co-creation”.
I have already heard about “co-creation”, but I didn’t know any details before attended the symposium.
However, I think I could get some hints to better understand this concept during my stay.

Workshop

The first day, I attended a workshop about how to co-create things with consumers.
In this workshop, at first, we sketched one item of ours. I chose my earphone.

When we sketched that, the lecturer gave us some limitations.
1. Don’t try to draw perfectly.
2. Just focus on the interesting points.

These are our illustrations.

The top right is mine and the one from my illustration three to the left is Kimura’s.

After that, we used “Zuzie”.
Zuzie is collaboration tool to make story with other people using their illustrations.
Here is a movie using Zuzie.

At first, our team focused on the hardness and the color which an item has.
But through discussion, finally we focused on the shape of the item.

At the workshop, the lecturer said “At the present time, designing methods have changed from previous time. Now it is not design for the user, it is design with the user.”
I remember these words strongly.
And I thought it is the most important concept of co-creation.

Plesentation

Second day was my presentation day.

My title was “Visualization of Awareness Information Based on Pre-Shared Knowledge”.
This research aims to promote tele-collaborative working by sharing each other’s context between members.
The presentation time was 20minutes. But I finished earlier because I was nervous.
It was better than overrunning, but I wish I would have used the whole time.

In Q&A time, I prepared some answers but some people asked me about experimental data of my research.
However I didn’t prepare detailed data. It was difficult to answer.
After presentation I thought I should not only prepare for the presentation but also prepare data.

After my presentation, I attended many sessions.
In this research area, many researchers are researching problems which are difficult to solve or might have even no solution.
For this reason, people may think they solve strange things, and ask themselves:What are they doing? What will it be useful for?
But if we check attentively we can find interesting points from every research.
It is easy to quit thinking deeply, but if we quit thinking we can’t reach interesting points.
While attending these sessions I thought of these things.

Evening session

On the third day’s night there was an evening session.

I expected to meet other university’s students. But there were only few students…
However, I could talk with a few students who attended to present their posters.
And we discussed about the difficulty of research.
These discussions are a good point of conferences.

If we hope to attend a conference, there are many things we have to solve.
But after attending it, we can get many things for our efforts.
After the symposium, I felt motivated to do a better presentation next time!!

P.S. After Kimura’s presentation, I found something shining white in his back…Oh…