I moved to Ireland one year ago to start my first graduate job as an interaction designer. I had just graduated a product design degree at Middlesex university, and was luckily to get the a job at the TRIL centre. My degree had prepared me well, but as I was the only interaction designer I wanted to get in touch with the IxDA community.

My first port of call to getting in touch was to contact the IxDA forums, I happened to stumble upon Seamus Byrne posting. I got in touch, and within a week we had our first meeting at The South William. One of the many great pub venues in Dublin.

The First Meet. Oct 2008

The first meeting saw just 5 designers. Lucky Seamus had printed out some IxDA posters so the group was easily found. The first event was mostly social with everyone trying to decide if it would be possible to create a group in Dublin. The first group was small but with a mix of talent. The most experienced designer was an American Ben Sykes, a Manager of User Centered Design at Cisco. Who had happened to only just hear about the event that morning.

Once the word got around we everything slowly gained momentum. Within a couple of months we had an active google group keeping our members updated. Once we became more established we decided that our meetings needed more structure.

At this point we tried to have a speaker / presenter at every meeting. We would always meet in Pubs and have been lucky to have venues with projectors and free space to accommodate us.

Presentation and a Pint.

Presentations and a pint are an ideal format in Dublin. Most members work in town, and its very easy to convince members to come to the pub once a month for a meet. 2009 saw some great presentations, a few are highlighted below.

Bill Caemmerer - Creating personas.

Clifton Evans - Examples of UI and IA work.

Celine O’Neil – UX London Synopsis.

Frank Long – Out of the box experience.

Dr Jon Dood – Eye Tracking.

Book Club

During 2009 Des Traynor organised a IxDA book club. The first book was Bill Buxtons sketching user experience, afterwards we all meet in the IQcontent offices to discuss the book.

Sketching and Arduino Workshops

Two workshops have been organised this year. Celine O’Neils ran a review of IA London, re-ran Dan Saffers sketching workshop. The workshop was well attended, with a final review at the end.

The second workshop was my Arudino and Flash workshop. 15 members and had a whole day of Arudino and examples of how they could intergrate it into there work.

IxDA at I-HCI Ireland.

During September  the IxDA were invited to run an industry session at the i-hci conference at Trinity college Dublin. Des Taynor, Frank Long, Henry Poskitt and Niamh Phelan presented an excellent morning session. We hope to build on the strength of this session and hope to present in the future and create a greater academic and industry conversation.

DEFUSE: Design for USE

During August I noticed that a call for event for Design week. I though this would be a great chance to tell the rest of the Dublin creatives about ‘Interaction Design’ and a chance to exhibit the excellent design work that is being done in Ireland. I got a short summary in the Design week people and this scared the rest of the members into planning this great event.

We formed a small event committed and decided to host an Ignite evening , Ignite talks are short presentations in which the presenter has 20 slides which automatically advance every 20 seconds. This 20 x 20 format makes short and entertaining presentations without waffle. Put together this makes an informative and entertaining evening. The IxDA Dublin was lucky to be sponsored by IQContent and Front End who gave us financial sponsorship to get us a great venue (The Sugar Club) and Promotion. We are proud to be sponsored by Bombay Sapphire who are supplying free cocktails to the first 100 entrants. There is a slight twist hosted by Gary, in which people are going to have to sketch there worst experience in Dublin in exchange for a Bombay Sapphire cocktail and with the chance to get a great sponsored prize.

We are hosting the event on 3rd November (Only two days after I Blog this). We currently have 170 RSVPS to the event, and an amazing speaker line up.

The IxDA Dublin has come a long way in a year. I’m proud to be member and I hope to see the association go from strength to strength in 2010. We may be quiet on the IxDA Internet forums, we are very active in our own real community, educating, evangelizing and making real and meaningful interactions.

I would like to thank Seamus Byrne for all of his great work in organsing and helping start the IxDA Dublin.

For more information on the IxDA Dublin.

http://www.ixd.ie
http://ixdadublin.ning.com

Come back in a week for a write up of DEFUSE: Design for Use.

I’m planning to make the blog more focused on Interaction Design.  I’m currently doing a lot of work that covers a broad range of interaction design issues.

Most of my current work has a certain amount of IP. Although at TRIL I’m currently working on..

• Designing a design process for the TRIL environment.  TRIL is unique because product creation is closely linked to academic research. You may see this written into a paper soon.
• Developing an interactive product using Flash (Actionscript 3) and External interface to interact with a C app.
• Doing data logging with the products I create.  I can’t say too much, but its getting some interesting feedback on product usage.
• Organizing and working with ethnographers to help develop the TRIL future.
• Working with Lawyers to help find lucrative iP in products that we create.

So I plan in the coming months, I plan to

• Update the existing content.
• Back post some news that has happened.
• Focus primarily on IP-Free case studies from work.
• Post small AS3 code snippets,
• … and generally give back to the interaction design community.

I would also like to thank all the visitors to the site.. I’m busy to update and fix all of my design conent.

Phidget Starter Kit #1

PhidgetInterfaceKit Package #1 – A PhidgetInterfaceKit 8/8/8 with an assortment of sensors:

I found this today from www.active-robots.com This will be the ultimate kit to start anyone with any interaction design project, I hope to get my hands on one and will be doing some writeups soon.