Eventyr: PPIG Work-in-Progress Workshop

PPIG Work-in-Progress Workshop, Salford 2007

After arriving in Manchester for the first time, I quickly decided that I liked it. This was not just because the department was 6* RAE rated or because the pubs smelled of rich mahogany and had many leather-bound books. It wasn't even because there was a giant scary santa or rumours of a dead fig tree garden on top of the giant tower that once whistled. It just was.

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All papers will be summarised in depth in the next ppig newsletter so I am just noting my immediate thoughts rather than describing contents.

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Day One

Session 1: Meta-Design

Luke Church and Alan F. Blackwell (University of Cambridge) - Usable Morality – A Challenge for End User Security:
Sporting the brilliant <rant></rant> t-shirt, Luke made an interesting case for security policies and moral terminology. Software is sold often on the basis of moral claims: good, bad, shady, take-control, etc.

Moritz Becker (Microsoft) and Vicky Weissman (Cornell University) - Policy Languages: For the Modern World or for an Alternate Universe:
Vicky's talk was about one thing that she, the librarians at Cornell University, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and the Australian Aboriginal community had in common.

Session 2: Design Practice

Chris Douce (Open) - Connecting Programming with Accessibility:
Within the talk Chris made the very interesting point (for me anyway) that Ajax is bad from a usability perspective.

Johanna Hunt (University of Sussex) - Agile Narratives: Conversational Storytelling Across Agile Systems Development Practices:
I managed to abbreviate my talk successfully down to 15 minutes for the benefit of all.

Cordula Krinner (Technische Universität Berlin) - Developers Anticipating Users’ Behavior During Design:
Was amazed and impressed by actual use of proper psychological investigation.

Dinner

I missed the conference dinner, but still had a lovely, lovely dinner with good company, good cocktails and a waiter that was kind enough to chase me down the street when I left my scarf behind.

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Day Two

Very annoyingly my right elbow decided to shift itself, so my attention span that morning was limited as I suddenly regretted having left my painkillers in the hotel. Ouch.

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Invited Talk:Dr Judith Good (University of Sussex) - Why learn to program anyway?:

Sadly this talk was cancelled due to her unexpected absence, but was fortunately replaced by an interesting discussion led by Thomas Green, Judith Segal and Marian Petre on Critical Thinking in Research. I tried to take notes, but pain caused some problems with my comprehension. Here's what I noted:

"Science is not 'that's interesting' but 'that's odd'" (Nils Bohr). Not 'That's interesting' but 'I wonder what that's a special case of?'

What is critical thinking? Don't take anything at face value vs. fits with our world view. There is no such thing as a proven theory. The question is: Is it convincing? Do I still believe it? Does the evidence still support it?

Evidence can be valued according to quality of data and quality of inference.

From a given hypothesis look at: definition of terms, scope, under what conditions, exception cases, what rules cause divergence?, and what are the converse questions?, why ask this question?, the six (what, why, when, where, who, how).

Hermeneutics of research. What's interesting? What do I want to know? What's worth knowing? What can I do?

Mantras:

Research doesn't stop in the lab
Soak yourself in the background
Everything always takes a lot longer than you think it will
If I knew what I was doing it wouldn't be research
Keep asking 'What is the connection?'
There is no one theory that will answer all your questions
Those that don't know the mistakes of the past...
Just because it is printed doesn't make it true
Research should be fun
Make friends with your GOST (grand overall scheme of things) and put to one side things that don't fit

Session 3: User Practice

Ann Abraham (Open University) - Sensemaking in web-based learning:
Students use google. I'm curious to see how this work develops, as it certainly reflects my experience of data sensemaking.

Nawal Alshebel and Thomas Green (University of Leeds) - Prototyping a user-interface design: the importance of tapping user knowledge:
Nice to see iterative development of both model and system.

Brian Bishop and Kevin McDaid (Dundalk Institute of Technology) - An Empirical Study of End-User Behaviour in Spreadsheet Debugging:
When debugging people look at cells twice. How odd.

Ian Entwistle (University of Salford) - Custom And Packaged Software Convergence:
Packaged software moves to customisability while custom software moves towards fixed implementable options.

Session 4: Cognitive Dimensions and Computer Science Education

Jiten Makan (University of Salford) - Can Cognitive Dimensions Predict User Trust?:
Fascinating that trust is potentially a bigger factor in ecommerce than usability. The big sites break all the rules, but when the little ones do we no longer trust them to provide the service they offer.

Luke Church (University of Cambridge) - Tradeoffs in Future Proofing Notations:
Provoked some interesting thoughts about secondary notations.

Morten Lindholm (University of Aarhus, Denmark) - Conceptions of Object-Oriented Terms:
Fully sympathised with his comments about the unexpected lengths of time you need for transcription.

Coffee and Closing Discussion

This went strangely well for me as I was awarded the 'Rose Elliot Prize for Time Control'. Hilarious that I can be well timed in presentations when my timekeeping in the real world is so notoriously bad, and a wonderful side comment on my lack of vegetarianism.

I also, through some strange luck managed to be short-listed for the 'big' prize. My name was then plucked from the bits of paper, meaning that I get money towards the cost of attending PPIG 07 this summer in Finland. A not unsubstantial prize!

The day ended with a rather successful drive back to Brighton in under 4 hours. Phew.

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Sad that I broke my camera (i.e. my phone) just before this visit so what I have is poor, but some photos will follow.

UPDATE: Photos Here