the Interaction Consortium

Yesterday we held a workshop at the IxC office with our staff and friends. It was the first in a series of workshops for the purpose of sharing knowledge and raising creative and technical discussions between IxC members.

The content was quite varied. I gave an introduction to all the cool things you can do with the Django testing framework, and Dan explained the pros and cons of using Nose testing in Django. I’m planning to write a series of blog posts on the subject with lots of in-depth and specific examples, so stay tuned!

Greg then presented Virtualenv, a tool for creating isolated Python environments. Definetely a must-have for distributed teams working on the same Python projects! Greg also showcased some of the features available in Sphynx, which we’re now going to use to document all our current and future open-source apps.

Aram then presented the work he did on Pocketmaps, a recent project for the Powerhouse Museum. This work was particularly challenging and original as it integrated OpenStreetMaps, Mapnik and LaTeX. Aram will soon write a dedicated post on this blog to share his tips and findings.

I closed the session with a demo of South, the emerging defacto standard for migrating databases in Django. South is still an early project but the feature set is already quite impressive. We’re now starting to roll over multiple projects to use South as it makes co-development much smoother.

The first edition was a success and we’re aiming to organise a similar workshop every month. They’re a great opportunity for us to keep up to date with the latest trends and best practices. We’re open to inviting participants from outside the IxC, either as presenters or attendees — so let us know if you’re interested!

So, I’ve just come back from a fantastic 2-week trip in San Francisco. It was my first time there but oh boy, I already love this city!

The main purpose was to present a paper on my PhD work at the Creativity and Cognition 09 Conference. There was a wide and interesting range of talks and attendees. There were also some truly inspiring keynote speakers, in particular Jane Prophet and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. And it all happened at the Berkeley Art Museum, right at the heart of the Berkeley University campus. I was really pleased to take part in that conference — it definitely was the pinnacle of my PhD life!

After the conference, I spent a week wandering around San Francisco with Damian and Viveka, two colleagues and friends of mine from CCS who had also come up for the conference. Obviously we did the token bike ride over the Golden Gate bridge and visited the colourful Hayes, Haight, Mission and Castro as well as the famous Lombard St, Presidio Park and Palace of Fine Arts. One memorable moment was spending Halloween in Castro — every person in the streets (and there were many) was wearing a crazy costume! We’re not quite used to that downunder and that was lots of fun.

Damian used to live in San Francisco 10 years ago and so we got to meet some of his old friends. One of them, David Bliss, gracefully invited us for drinks at a nice pub near his office behind Town Hall. David is a co-founder and Director of a successful design agency, called Odopod. They have built themselves a solid reputation in a wide range of creative activities, from digital marketing to graphic and UI design, through building applications and branding products for a wide range of platforms, from desktop to the Web and mobile. It was interesting to hear David talk about how Odopod evolved in the 8 years of its life, and how it quite rapidly grew from 7 to 35 employees. That was certainly very inspiring, as we do have similar plans for growing IxC’s network and activities in the near future. I was also pleased to hear that their website was built in Django and that they were starting to use Django in some work experiments.

That enjoyable evening encounter made me realise that there was a truly high potential for IxC to develop its involvement overseas. We have already conducted successful projects remotely in various parts of Australia and in the UK. The agile working methodologies that we have developed in our team have allowed us to overcome many barriers caused by geographical separation. I feel that the IxC totally relates to the kind of dynamism driving the IT sector and companies like Odopod in the Bay Area.

So, if you are in San Francisco (or from any parts of the world) and would like to work with a team of Web and interaction design enthusiasts, please do get in touch! We’d be more than happy to explore ways of collaborating.