Estimated Reading Time: 1 minutes
Giving number 100 of 112 25-second speeches this morning was the scariest moment in my academic life*. If you're not familiar, CHI has a fun tradition of doing CHIMadness each morning where EVERY speaker of the day gets up and does a 25 second "commercial" for their talk. Very nerve racking. VERY. The room was so packed that the organizers needed to invoke the fabled Fire Marshall rules and keep people out of the room.
This is what I remember: I said "Good Morning Atlanta!" much too loudly and then Layered Elaboration blah blah blah previous iterations blah blah blah permanent markers blah blah 4:30 in Regency 6. Completely quiet audience. Exit stage right.
After that, I needed to get to a workshop on Storyboarding. I was not that interested in spending my morning doing this, because I know everything there is about storyboards...wrong! It turned out to be a great class. It was led by Pieter Jan "PJ" Stappers, from Delft University of Technology's ID Studio Lab's Context Mapping group. Such a cool class! We really got into storyboarding at a level I had not thought about before and did a fun class exercise with cameras and play-acting to build storyboards for an equalizing remote control.
I spent the next few hours in a state of excitement and fear for my impending presentation. I met our session chair from Cornell as well as the other speakers. I was second. I was getting really nervous until the chair introduced me as Gregory. Allison and I had practiced to just pick up from there, but, instead I opened with "I go by Greg. Apparently, I filled out the form assuming my mother would read it." And it went smoothly from there. I got some easy questions (how old were the kids) and some not so easy ones (how is this different from brainstorming? when should you throw away designs and start over and how does this technique allow for that?). My goto answer was "artifacts".
And then dinner and then most of Lost and now bed. It was a great day but long.
*besides the Institute for Interactive Technologies Corporate Advisory Board making me ridiculously nervous 12 years ago this week...go Bloomsburg Huskies!