Thursday, August 1.
Margot took us through Chapter 3 of Paul Dourish's book, where he gives a short background to the philosophy of embodied interaction, discussing the contrasting positions of the phenomenologists and the positivists. Margot also drew a diagram that traced the intellectual history of ethnomethodology ( I think ). Jared took it down, so he might want to comment further.
Then we discussed the ways in which we wanted to use these meetings in the future"
The first ( McGarry?'s idea in absentia ) was to organise a paper that everyone could read before the meeting, and then come to the meeting to discuss it. This was furthered by the proposal that we generate a joint reference bibliography of papers and resources, probably using the wiki, where everyone who's read a certain paper can annotate/add comments to it. It was also suggested that we have a common endnote library file.
We talked about the using the meeting to host Ben's video card game. Margot suggested that it would be better to plan a day-long activity around the game than try to squeeze it into a morning meeting, or fragment it over two weeks.
Another idea was to use the meetings as reports or feedback sessions on work in progress ( something we already do ). The idea was to make the meetings interim deadlines for projects that have to be finished, like the AUIC paper deadline, or Brett and Tim's confirmation seminars that are coming up in March. It was thought this might promote motivation, provide some kind of social accountability to others in the group for our individual work, and help us strengthen the quality of our work by making it available for critique earlier than we normally would.
Jared had some new ideas for ways to use the meetings. One was using something like a photomontage ( he brought in some examples ) as a means of exploring new products and technologies ( not to mention the fun of cutting pictures out of magazines and pasting them together ). He also brought in a sketch he'd done of a room that filled an A4 piece of paper, and talked about using sketching as a means to sharpen our observational skills, to interpret our environment, as resources for storytelling, or maybe as a substitution for video data in a video card game like thing.
The suggestion was raised that we invite other people to the meetings to talk to the group about their research or expertise. Alan Boykiw ( sp? ) was suggested by someone to come and talk to us about the ambient cafe project with Inf Env. A spin off of this was the idea that we might use the meetings as field trip time, to go somewhere inspirational perhaps. The Ipswich Museum was suggested. I'll leave that one alone.
Finally, there was general consensus that we needed an agenda for our meetings, and that we should stick to time during the meetings. There was unanimous uninterruptible applause for the suggestion that there should never be a meeting without munchies for all. Whether we have a roster for who brings what when, or a kitty for someone to run out and buy stuff from the lollyshop was left undecided.
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