A few days after attending the first HighWire workshop on Physicality this HighWiree took off to go to the Pervasive conference. This is one of the premier ubiquitous computing conferences and on the first day ran a series of workshops. I attended “Energy Awareness and Conservation through Pervasive Applications.” This is a very specific domain and the likely HighWire project resulting from the Physicality workshop will not be in the area of energy awareness, efficiency or tackling fundamental problems like algorithm efficiency. The common ground of these workshops for me being the mobile and ubiquitous computing they hoped to exploit.

Despite the different areas of work, the aims of both workshops were similar, to define a research agenda for those involved. The approach taken by each workshop was very different and both generated plenty of ideas and inspiration.

The Physicality workshop introduction set the fun and playful mood to be carried through the project. Creating craft representations of facets of ones personality broke the ice rather than the now tired introduction of name and short background bio.

Introductions at Perasive were the more formal name, where from and interests. Prof. Giulio Jacucci, the organiser and presenter did try to make this a little more exciting with a favourite food or fun fact.

After the introductions at Pervasive the rest of the morning was taken with presentations of accepted papers to be published in a special edition of PsychNology. Jon Bird of the Open University presented the Change Project more specifically “The Pulse of Tidy Street.” Followed a project describing how devices can interact with Smart Meters using web technologies, fascinating for me as close to how I imagined my PhD would be perhaps a year ago. The last presentation by Duncan Wilson on the engineering firm Arup’s approach to sustainable cities.

The Highwire workshop included a presentation from Tinker to set the scene and give participants an idea of where this partner company is situated.

Post-its were used at the Highwire workshop to put ideas on boards on three typical areas that need to be addressed in any physical computing installation. That’s the methods of data capture and potential sources, imaginary, wacky and impossible included. The means of processing and transforming and means of output or interaction with the data.

At Pervasive the ever present post-it was also utilised but a more general comment on anything approach which were then condensed into three themes by a few volunteers. After lunch we broke-up into three groups to tackle one of these emergent themes. I set out to a local cafe with James Scott, Jörn Loviscach and Matthias Betz armed with a pen and a couple of pieces of A3 paper. Initially we tried to find common ground but quickly each person lead off into their own area. This proves how broad this particular area is and finding an agreed overall research imperative and set of questions may be impossible. Governance plays as much a part as technological research challenges.

The Physicality workshop kept people on topic after lunch with an exercise in making something and part way through proceedings swapping the topic the team had to discuss.

Both workshops were concluded with a presentation from these groups. Looking back on both of these proves designing a workshop is as much an exercise in managing levels of disagreement and with them different agendas as generating that buzz around a particular theme.