TEI growing up, Dinner with Hiroshi Ishii and Don Norman

This is now the 5th TEI conference and it has about 300 people attending. It is still a very young community, with many students attending, but also the "big names" are at the conference. When Brygg and I started with a small conference in 2007 (in Baton Rouge) and 2008 (in Bonn) we considered there is a need for tangible and embedded interaction work to find a venue but we did not expect that the community was growing so rapidly. Looking at the presentations and contributions show at this year's conference it is clear that the conference is growing up - without losing its exciting mix of contributions.

It is great to talk to Don Norman and Hiroshi Ishii over dinner and seeing them engaging with this young community. They both have made major contributions to this community and have inspired my personal research some 10 years back. If you have not done so I recommend to read some of their early contributions, such as Hiroshi's CHI1997 paper [1,2] and Don's invisible computing book [3,4]. Both have published and publish many interesting articles and books which are central to the HCI literature, check out their web pages: Hiroshi Ishii and Don Norman.

[1] Ishii, H. and Ullmer, B., "Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms," Proceedings of Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '97), ACM, Atlanta, March 1997, pp. 234-241.

[2] Fitzmaurice, G., Ishii, H., Buxton, W., "Bricks: Laying the Foundations for Graspable User Interfaces," Proceedings of Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '95), ACM, Denver, May 1995, pp. 442-449.

[3] Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer. 1998, Cambridge MA, MIT Press

[4] Donald Norman, The design of Everyday Objects, 2002 Basic Books (Perseus)