Bart invited me to go to Wageningen with him, to visit the restaurant of the future. It was supposed to be a state of the art laboratory, and a cooperation between Wageningen University and Noldus, a company that designs solutions for behavioral research. I’ve had a one day training with Noldus software at the beginning of this year, so I kinda knew what they did. And I expected seeing a behavioral research laboratory in a restaurant setting to be worth my time.
Anyways, really early in the morning, going to a seminar is not something I do often, so I did not have the best preparation. After 2 hours by train and bus, I realized that going to something like this in Dickies and an Adidas jacket might not be the best way to present yourself. But feck it right? We arrived at Noldus, drank a cup of coffee and chatted with some people, which was already quite nice. But of course they had a program for us.

The day started with some presentations on Noldus. Later on people presented some use cases, which to me all seemed kinda… dodgy. In my master’s I’m being taught how to properly design an experiment. We do a literature study, in which we try to find out what factors might be of influence on what we’re trying to research, after which we design an experiment in which we try to manipulate as few things as possible and use statistics in order to say if there really is an effect. Completely unlike how the use cases were, where people just gather as much data as possible and use data mining to find possible correlations… One might call it arrogance, but at HTI we really learn how to do proper research.

One thing that was (and still is) bothering me, is the fact that one study was performed by another department of my own university. They have created a laboratory where they do exactly the same research as… our own department. Similar methods, similar research, different labs. Waste of money? Methinks so…

[singlepic id=99 w=320 h=240 float=right]But ok, after the use cases, we were driven to the Restaurant of the Future, where we had a really great lunch (or brunch actually). We had a chat with some employees of Noldus and of course tried to find all cameras used in the observations. Apparently all the cameras and other sensors produce around 60 gigs of data per hour, which has to be processed by (presumably) students afterwards. Via the control room, a number of things can be manipulated. These include smell, temperature, lights, colour, the food, general layout, and more. Things that they want to research with this data are for example the effect that the colour of the lights has on preferences for food. The restaurant is supposed to be running for 10 years, in order to have produced enough data… which is quite long…

[singlepic id=101 w=320 h=240 float=right]After this small demo of the restaurant of the future, we headed back to Noldus where we had some demonstrations of some of the new machinery Noldus has. Among others, these are eyetrackers and once again I got the impression people use these to just have some more data. Researchers just don’t know what they’re looking for anymore, which is a shame…

The whole Noldus thing coming to an end, I walked to the place of a friend of mine, with whom I had dinner. The journey back to Eindhoven was horrible, with missing trains and all. Which lead me to come back home at around midnight, 17 hours after leaving home. Talk about a long day…

Lectures and courses
I’ve been following so many lectures on so many papers. It’s been crazy. Subjects ranged from “A comparison between Heuristics Evalutation Methods” to “User Research using Mechanical Turk”. I’ve been trying to attend to a lot of usability lectures, some of which were really interesting and some of which were plain bad. It was nice to see the difference between academic work and corporate work.
On the general however, it’s just like school. A lot of people sitting and listening to a lecture. Some people taking notes on paper, some taking notes on their macbook pros and some just taking pictures of the projected slides.
I took a course on Wednesday. I figured that if I want to know anything about usability and study this in a psychological fashion, I need to know how to apply it to designs. So I registered for this course by Mike Atwood and Tom Hewett from Drexel University called “A practical approach to interactive system design”. I learned a couple of methods that serve as a basis for designing and evaluating interactive systems. I did this together with two PhD students, Malte and Javed. It was really fun, since when we were putting our skills to the test in the assignments, we did a great job. And we made puns, like ’snackquisition’, which I still like to be honest. I’m writing it down, knowing that this is typically a “you had to be there”-kinda thing, but I don’t care too much bout that now.

Social stuff
This whole course thing also lead to me going to the google hospitality event. Which basically is a free drink at some expensive ‘Grand Hotel Firenze’ aka standing in line for your drinks for too long with too many people in a place that is too posh. It was however nice to meet some people and talk about geeky stuff. It’s not that different from a gaming weekend to be honest.
I didn’t go to bed too late, since I had to present my poster on Thursday. I was scared that people would come up with some tough questions (which they did), so I decided I needed a good night’s sleep.
Poster presentation
A large part of CHI consists of poster presentations. On Wednesday Brian and Daan presented their researched. I presented a poster I made on a research on Thursday. It was quite nice, because some people even showed an interest in our research, even though it’s nothing applied like the majority of CHI papers. Also funny that most people would read the poster and then touch my upper arm briefly to ask me for comments. (check the poster if you want to know why that’s funny).

The trip back however was hell. Our plane left at 10am, which forced us to be on the airport at around 8am, which forced us to grab a train at 6:30am, which forced us to leave the appartment at around 6am, which forced us to wake up at around 5am. Luckily I did wake up early enough every day, to not be completely deregulated timewise. Anyway, after a week of Florence, Eindhoven is even uglier than it was before and colder too. It’s been a great experience to be at a conference. I did meet a lot of new people and saw people I hadn’t seen in a long time.