Alan’s blog

Just at MobiKUI in Fribourg.  I did tutorial this morning and just had talk by Roope Takala about cool things happening at Nokia.  Dominique Guinard now talking about kinetic user interfaces.  My first time in Switzerland too and looking forward to fondue this evening.

Last week’s HCI2007 conference and the Physicality workshop now all finished (except sorting out the the final finances for HCI … but I’ll forget that for now!)

Being part of the organisation of things you always see so many things that are not as planned (like going wrong), but for the delegates it all seems a well-oiled machine. In this as in many other domains, the mark of a rubust system is not whether or not it fails, but how it copes with failure. This is the heart of my principles for appropriate intelligence when designing ‘intelligent’ user interfaces and also ‘fail fast programming’¹ when designing and debugging critical computer systems.

Great to see so many old friends … and meet new people … and after able to show Nad² the glories of the Lake District.

1. I must make web pages for this some day … but see debugging notes I did for a software engineering course a few years ago [back]
2. see his blog on arriving at the conference and his Flickr photos of the Lake District [back]