Laura blogs a conference

I'm at the International Symposium on Intelligent Environments this week. Like Less Is More last year, this is organised by MSR in Cambridge, and has an unusual (to me!) mix of compscis (mainly on the HCI and AI sides), designers, artists, and sociologists (I think).

So far, Don Norman has given an interesting keynote - as usual for such things, nothing especially new, but lightly amusing coverage of fairly obvious high level material. No call to arms in this one. I'll write up my notes at some point; I could of course be blogging in realtime, in a terribly cliched way, but I think I'd rather digest the material before writing it properly. For once I've been happy to take notes electronically - the lighting in the auditorium is rather random and so in general the audience is in pitch darkness, meaning only those of us with glowing screens or amazing writing ability can take notes at all. I've been very glad of my glowing keyboard!