DPPI 2009

Jeroen warned me: the second week of blogging is the most dangerous one and he was right. In fact, I haven't posted anything in more than two month.

Beside some computer problems, one of the thing keeping me busy during that time was DPPI 2009. It turned out to be an enjoyable conference, with great food, and surprisingly well organized given the way these things are usually run in France. I have also met some nice people and had some interesting discussion but unfortunately did not find any presentation that would be directly relevant to my work.

One fascinating thing with design-oriented conferences is that organizers always try to do something a little bit « different », for example with the traditional conference bag or the badge given to each participant. DPPI added an interesting twist to the conference dinner: it was an assigned seated dinner and the seating plan was to be created automatically based on social contacts during the conference. Everyone had to get a ring with a RFID chip and the time spent together during the coffee breaks would be used to form groups. The result was displayed all the time on a big LCD screen in the hallway. A couple of conference attendees in fact used this screen for a clever hack, writing their name on tape and pasting it directly on a table.

At the end of the day, it did not work out very well, though. First, many people did not get a ring or even refuse to use the system, which was to be expected but is still a bit disappointing. Then, many technical constraints made the system a lot less cool than it might have been. In fact, the system would only notice a ring if it was placed in the middle of one of three tables in the hallway. This, combined with an apparently straightforward matching algorithm (the more you spent time with someone, the more likely you were to be seated together), made sure that no serendipitous discovery happened. It felt much more like telling the system whom you want to seat with rather than providing occasions to meet new people or reflect on social encounters during the conference.

But the last blow was dealt by the organizers themselves: instead of using numbers or little name signs to reflect the plan produced by the computer, they decided to print it on a poster, remove a seat from each table and let the tables unmarked. The idea was ostensibly to force people to mingle instead of sticking to the seating plan. The results was highly predictable: people sat together with acquaintances, ignoring the seating plan altogether. It was not all that important however and the diner turned out to be very enjoyable!