So, what have I been up to?
Well, this is my lighter teaching semester (I deliver a whopping two hours of lectures this semester, compared to 44 hours in Semester 1) so most of my contact time is tutorials and project supervision, which is a nice change of pace.
But my time has mainly been going on three things:
Marking. My last big assignment came in, and marking that has accounted for a good quarter of my time this month!
Preparing an Expression of Interest to a funding call. It's my first application as PI in about five years (of which 4.5 were spent in various stages of illness or dealing with the pandemic), so that's a good milestone. It fits well with what I'm doing on the Michael Beverley Innovation Fellowship, so that's helpful.
A trip to the Netherlands, along with Stuart Murray (of the itDf project) and Hassan Dogar to visit my old SUITCEYES-colleagues Astrid Kappers and Myrthe Plaisier at the University of Eindhoven; designer Simon Dogger (also based in Eindhoven); and Femke Krijger, author of "De evenwichtskunstenaar" (The Balance Artist) and one of the organisers of the Tactile Transitions Project.
The trip was fantastic, if rather whistle stop!
Although I saw Astrid in person in October when I attended a symposium in Borås, I didn't get to bring any of the stuff we've worked on since COVID, and I haven't seen Myrthe in the flesh for 3.5 years! The great disappointment of the SUITCEYES project was that COVID meant we couldn't demonstrate to each other what we'd been working on. Haptics isn't something you can just describe to people! So, having the opportunity to show them our Haptic Navigation prototypes, and experience some of the really interesting experiments they had been running was brilliant. But I don't want to give the impression that this was all about tidying up loose ends on SUITCEYES: it was also great to discuss potential future experiments, and we will hopefully be back later this year or early next!
Simon Dogger is a visually impaired designer, who I was introduced to by Myrthe about 18 months ago. We've spoken many times online, so it was great to have the chance to meet in person. Using the demonstrators we had brought as a jumping off point, we had some great discussions. Simon, being a designer, has no qualms about giving his views or taking charge of the process, which was great. There was a brilliant moment where he asked "Will it work outdoors?". Well, our location system wouldn't (at least not without a lot of setting up) but when we realised that we could "Wizard of Oz" the signals, that was it - we were off outside! Great stuff.
Femke Krijger I knew through the SUITCEYES project, but I had the opportunity to meet in person at the Borås workshop last October. Femke has Usher's Syndrome, and is deadfblind, but has spent a great deal of time reflecting on the transition into deafblindness and towards the use of tactile senses (which is the focus of her book), so she provided some excellent discussion. And kindly provided a tour of the beautiful city of Leiden, which was an added bonus!
Having Stuart with us was a particularly good experiencing, seeing his views on how we, as designers, engineers and scientists, approached imagining. He's writing up a news piece for the ITDF page, which will be good - I'm looking forward to having a proper debrief with him.
To say the trip was "a triumph" feels like hyperbole, but after the last 18 months of SUITCEYES and the first three years of ITDF being largely trapped online, it is hard to understate just how significant this felt.
