Last week I had the opportunity to travel to London for work. Although it takes less than two hours by train from Brussels South to Saint Pancras station, it was my first time in London (shame on me!). It was a close call because I got a terrible cold with a mild fever the day before my departure. I am glad I didn’t cancel my trip though, because the next few days would be very inspiring.
On the first day, I had a meeting at the Agents and Intelligent Systems (AIS) research group in the Department of Informatics at King’s College. With a multidisciplinary team of researchers from all over Europe, we are working on an Innovative Training Network (ITN) proposal. The overall aim is to develop responsible deliberation technologies in the field of Narrow AI and Deep Learning. Given the enthusiasm and expertise of the partners, as well as the excellent work of the project coordinator Elizabeth Black, I am confident the proposal will adhere to high-quality standards.
In the evening, I met with Dylan Yamada-Rice who I got to know on Twitter (yes, that actually happens). Dylan combines a job as a researcher at Dubit, an international company that develops digital products for children, with a position as lecturer at the London College of Art. Dylan’s research interests are concerned with early childhood literacy, and play and multimodal communication practices. We had an interesting chat about visual research methods to give children a voice in design practices, and we discussed opportunities to collaborate via the DigilitEY network. Moreover, she wants to invite me to give a talk about my research in Sheffield next year.
On the second day, I had hipster breakfast in Bloomsbury with Alyssa Alcorn, who I first met at the ACM SIGCHI Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference in New York back in 2013. Taking into account how often I have seen her over the past few years, she is by far my best conference buddy. I even visited her in Edinburgh while she was still doing her Ph.D. Currently, she is working as a postdoc fellow at UCL’s Institute of Education (IOE) on the H2020 DE-ENIGMA project. The overall goal of the project is to realize context-sensitive, multimodal and naturalistic human-robot interaction (HRI) aimed at enhancing the social imagination skills of children with autism.
Later that day, I met with Pinar Oztop near London Bridge. Pinar is a Ph.D. candidate at Plymouth University where she participates in the CogNovo doctoral training program funded by the EU Marie Curie initiative. Just like Dylan, I met Pinar on Twitter after posting a question about developmental psychology, her area of expertise. Pinar’s research focuses on collaborative creativity and how it can be enhanced from a child-developmental point of view. Recently she conducted a cross-cultural experiment with primary school children in the UK and Turkey to understand how social cohesion influences the process of creativity. For my Ph.D. I have looked at similar aspects of collaborative creativity (e.g. task and social cohesion, groupthink), be it from a different perspective. Since we have a lot of research interests in common and are eager to collaborate, we did some brainstorming in a pub later that night. After a few beers, we ended up with a project idea written on a napkin.
On the third day, I attended Rilla Khaled’s thought-provoking seminar on Speculative Play at UCL Knowledge Lab. Rilla is currently an associate professor at the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. We first met at CHI Play in Toronto in 2014 where we, together with Vero Vanden Abeele (KU Leuven) and Asimina Vasalou (UCL), organized an academic workshop on Participatory Design for Serious Games. During her talk, Rilla explained how Speculative Play brings together the critical practices and forecasting of speculative design with the hands-on experience of play, and in particular the play of interactive digital game-like things. Inspired by Rilla’s talk, the four of us are considering to organize a follow-up workshop, but this time focusing on speculative games as a form of serious games. A possible venue is CHI Play in Amsterdam in October next year.
On my fourth and last day in London I switched to tourist-mode. In the morning I visited Tate Modern (finally!) and I walked along South Bank towards London Eye and Big Ben. In the afternoon, Seray Ibrahim showed me around in the city center. We visited a slightly weird expo at the Barbican Centre and talked about our research in a little pub where the time has stood still. Seray’s Ph.D. research at UCL Knowledge Lab concerns children with severe speech and physical impairments. She investigates ways of supporting multimodal communication with assistive technology that centers on children’s values and builds on their competencies. I admire Seray’s child-centred and values-led design approach, something we discussed extensively at the IDC conference in Manchester last June.
As always, it is a matter of finding the time (and a little money) to realize these plans for future collaborations. In any case, I enjoyed my stay in London. Except for the weather and the high living costs, it is definitely my kind of city: vibrant, multicultural and a hotspot for arts and design. However, what inspired me most were the discussions with people from different backgrounds who share a desire to make the world a better place through their research. To say it with the words of Edith Ackerman who recently passed away: people who show an incredible resilience and playful patience similar to that of the craftsman who never ceases to deepen the relationship with whatever s/he is working on. To me, being an academic is about the joy of never finishing anything, of knowing that whatever you do, it is never finished.
