Cross country for cross-media (1)

On Thursday I flew to Hemavan in Sweden. It is a mountainous ski resort (I hate snow), but there will be a conference on cross-media. In full the conference is dubbed the 1st conference on cross-media interaction design; shortened CMID07. It is organised by the Charlotte (photograph) and Mikael Wiberg of Umea University, in the Swedish part of Lapland (see my postings and photographs of my visit to the Saami).

At first glance it is a strange place to have a conference as it is rather off the regular conference spots. But I guess for the University of Umea it is a way to profile itself and dive deeper in the subject of cross-media interactive design.

Last year I received an invitation from Catharina Nora with the invitation. I put it aside as the mail was not very specific and it looked like other invitations which are usually soliciting your participation. But Catharina did not give up and send another message to persuade me to come. The only arguments I had against it were the date and the snow. And as I was available, I had to forget the argument about snow. I send on the information on the conference to people and publicised it on my blog.

And yes here we are with a delegation of four Dutch persons. We met that morning at the airport: Monique de Haas, Eric Voigt, Maykel Hanekamp and I. At Stockholm Airport, we had three hours to kill before flying on to Hemavan. And within half an hour we were busy talking about cross-media, the digital media situation in the Netherlands and the ideas (Monique had to go outside several times to get her nicotine shot).

The conference organisation had booked seats on the plane, but people did not know each other till they were in Hemavan and were welcomed by Catherina. At the first night there was a short introduction to the conference and a presentation, followed by a dinner at the hotel.

All in all there are roughly 40 people present, including people from Umea University. It is a smaller conference audience than one would expect for the subject and I could think of people that should have been there like the Dutch people of the NRC-Next who are working on a cross-media paper project.

The organisation got immediately points for the welcome bag with the proceedings and some goodies and guides. The proceeding (in print) gave an idea of what was to come. And if I had any hesitation, I could see from the proceedings that it was going to be an interesting event, full of serious discussions and fun. Is cross-media a serious subject or should it be crossed out? Debating such an issue is more interesting with 40 people than with a crowd of 200 or even more than 1000 people. The fun would be in the afternoons: a visit to the Saami, the indigenous people of Lapland, skiing, snowboarding, sauna, hot tubs and of course the meals with deer and reindeer.

I will devote a couple of postings to the issues discussed. In a separate posting I will transmit some photographs of the visit to the Saamis.

Conference Program - CMID 07 22 - 25 March 2007 in Hemavan

Time Thursday 22 March
16h00 Welcome to CMID´07
16h30 Charlotte Wiberg, Umeå University, Sweden, about Crossmedia Interaction Design
17h00 Claes Nilsson, AVID, Sweden, "Film, TV and editing. Where are we and where are we going?"
18h30 Presentation material and equipment testing
20h30 Dinner at Hemavan´s Högfjällshotell

Friday 23 March
09h00 Christy Dena, University of Sydney, Australia, *Patterns in Cross-Media Interaction Design: It’s much more than a URL… (Part 1)*
10h00 Kalle Jegers, Umeå University, Sweden, "Usability Evaluation and Cross Media Entertainment"
10h40 Coffee
11h00 Tommy Strandvall and Susanne Sperring, Åbo Akademi University, Media City, Vasa, Finland, "Set-Top Box Interactivity vs. Mobile Phone Interactivity in an Interactive play-along TV game show"
11h45 Lunch
12h45 Free time
16h00 Jarmo Röksä, Midgard Lab, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway, "Trends in computer games design"
16h45 Johan Bornebusch and Mattias Arvola, Södertörn University College, Sweden, "Early explorations of interaction design for nature experience"
17h30 Break
17h45 The National Library of Norway, Mo i Rana, Norway
18h20 Eric Voigt and Maykel Hanekamp, Noordelijke Hogeschool, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, "The Ins and Outs of the Minor-CrossMedia"
20h30 Dinner at Hemavan´s Wärdshus

Saturday 24 March
09h00 Liam Bannon, University of Limerick, Ireland
10h00 Karin Danielsson, Umeå University, "Cross-Media Learning: Design of an Entertaining Educational Computer Game - a case study"
10h40 Coffee
11h00 Mattias Löw, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
11h40 Tommy Strandvall presents "The Space Trainees" Edutainment format for language training
12h00 Lunch at Stella Polaris in Fjällparken
13h00 Free time
16h00 Mikael Malanin, Helsinki University of Technology, "New paradigms of print - associating print media to the digital media and user generated community products"
16h45 Jak Boumans, Electronic Media Reporting, Almere, The Netherlands, "Cross-media: an operational term for city and regional development policy"
17h30 Break
17h45 Charlotte Wiberg, Umeå University, Sweden
18h20 Heather Desurvire, Behavioristics Inc. CA, USA, "Master of the Game: The Crucial Role of Accessibility in Future Game Design"
20h30 Dinner at Hemavan´s Högfjällshotell

Sunday 25 March
09h00 Mikael Wiberg, Umeå University, Sweden, "Midgets: Exploring the Design Space for Truly Liquid Media"
10h00 Monique de Haas, Dondersteen Media, The Netherlands, "How to get a story across"
10h40 Coffee
11h00 Panel debate
12h30 Conclusion by Charlotte Wiberg
13h00 Lunch a Stella Polaris in Fjällparken

Blog Posting Number 702

Tags: cross-media, enteratinment, games