Hello (again) world!

Hi internet! Remember me?

It's over a year since I started this Blog - and more than six months since I last posted! Wowsers! So much for fortnightly, eh?

That is, in part, due to the birth of my second child in the spring (she's doing well, thanks - as are her sister and mother!). You forget how disruptive babies can be! And of course, the rest of life doesn't go away - you can't abruptly refuse to deliver lectures, or mark coursework, or supervise students just because you've had a new baby... And I've had four(!) research students reach viva in the last six months (all passing with minor corrections, thankfully!), with another four in the process of writing up. All stuff that can't easily be dropped!

Anyway life has settled down again, and my bandwidth has returned to the point at which I can think about things like blogs again - so here I am! Where to start? Well, perhaps it's best to start by looking back at the last six months first (and how those aims for the new year are shaping up) and then forwards to the future.

So here we go. I set myself three priorities: funding proposals; getting hands on with the research; and getting more engaged with stakeholders (especially disabled people's organisations). Let's see how the first half of 2014 fared on these fronts!

First up, the Fellowship didn't go in in March. It's still not in, though it's moved on a long way since January, despite babies and PhD Vivas and whatnot. The details are finalised: it's just a matter of costing, letters of support and trying to fit it all down to the requisite seven pages. There can, of course, be something of the old Pareto principle here: it takes a disproportionately long time to dot the 'i's and cross the 't's and it really isn't as exciting as actually having the ideas and working up the proposal in the first place. Still, it's got to be done. On top of that, there's an exciting opportunity to get involved in hosting a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, which would really help us to get some of the seating work I've been doing up and running; and also the possibility of following up some of the work on the engineering imagination, looking at how we can encourage this in engineers. There are other opportunities, but the name of the game is actually getting these submitted: there's always the danger of hopping from one idea to another, and no one measures you on the number of proposals you started.

Second, getting more hands on has been going rather well. I've deliberately carved out some time to work on projects, and one consequence is that I've had the opportunity to flex more of my programming skills. I've implemented a stereoscopic triangulation algorithm for marker tracking using Ian Flatters' Wiimote rigs (which feeds directly into the fellowship); I've built a force platform for measuring centre of pressure; I've been working up the manipulandum in more detail; and I've built a switch-accessible game for Together Through Play from scratch using Pygame and the Arduino (more on that below!). Optotrak has taken a back seat for the time being, as some interesting opportunities have arisen with the manipulandum, and I'm currently working with Sarah Astill over in Sports and Exercise Science to build it into a rig that we can use for studying force control in spinal injury patients. And National Instruments have been kind enough to fund a summer student, the outstanding Stuart Watt, to help develop it, as part a stress test for their new myRIO platform. By the by, we do have a PhD studentship on the go in this area, if you happen to be looking...

Number three, getting more engaged with stakeholders has not moved forwards yet - but I'm optimistic that it's about to. Some opportunities to get involved in an Enabled by Design hackathon offer some promising leads, and we've been showing off the results of Together Through Play down at New Designers, and will be heading off for a Breeze on Tour event next week - so at least my head's above the parapet, there. Just got to make the most of these opportunities...

So, that's the last six months in a nutshell. The immediate future holds more of the same: finishing off those proposals, re-establishing some old partnerships that have rather lapsed in the last 12 months, building new bridges and getting the manipulandum polished off and used. It's going to be a good summer, I reckon.

But what of the blog? Well, I'd like to move away from these lengthy reflective posts, towards something a bit more focussed. And there are two things I'd like to include. One is the outcomes of research. I still owe a summary of the outcomes from K005; and with Together Through Play finished there's a nice opportunity to summarise the outcomes which we're writing up for publication. The other is to do some thinking aloud: Mark Mon-Williams and I are looking into grip modelling, and it seems like this would be a good place to chalk down a few ideas, and describe the major concepts behind it.

So stay tuned!