I’ve not been writing here much recently due to having a lot of work on and a bit of travelling to do. Had a few things I wanted to put down but not found time, so I’m hoping to squeeze them out now in low bandwidth format…

So, LIFT’07 — overall a good experience. As a conference it was very well-organised and exceptional value for money. downsides — far more general than I was expecting, with the inevitable lack of depth that entails (at least in my area of interest, ubicomp). Delegates seemed to be a majority of policy-makers, suits and higher-ups with much less of a mix of entrepeneurs, designers, academics and hackers.

Highlights for me were the openstreetmap workshop, Jan Chipchase on illiteracy and mobile phone design, and Frederic Kaplan on the research aspects of Aibo. Brian Cox’s talk on the impending large hadron collider was also an inspiration, not least in terms of how to communicate a ridiculously inaccessible topic to a general audience. Videos are gradually appearing online and I’m really looking forward to watching Ben Cerveny’s talk again to see if I have more chance of following it second time around.

Ultimately I think the best thing for me was the networking — I spent some quality time chatting with great people over a few beers and/or fondue: Mikel Maron, Sanjay Khanna, Tom Hume (who’s conscientiously written up stuff) and Nathan Eagle, as well as the old interaction design crew.

Pity I only met Julian and Nicolas very briefly, as I’m sure we have lots to talk about. There’ll be other times.