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GHC 09: Final Report

Around 1:00 am last night I walked through my front door after a fantastic 3 days at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing at Tucson, AZ. I came back weighted down with mountains of swag, a folder full of business cards and contacts, and a mind full of new ideas and inspiration. Again I’d like to report on my two favorite activities from the last day of the conference.

Systers Lunch

At each Grace Hopper, the women from the Systers list try to get together and actually meet one another face-to-face. This year they had you draw a random number which determined what table you sat at. My table had an undergraduate, a few grad students like myself, a “life-coach”, a developer for Apple, and two executives of the Anita Borg Institute. During the lunch we heard from one of the Systers Pass-It-On Award winners, Oreoluwa from Nigeria. She used the money to hold a week-long intensive women’s technology empowerment camp for middle-school aged students. The camp focused on teaching the girls basic computer skills, such as email and web-search, and fostering an interest in pursuing computer studies further. While she was describing her project, a wine glass was passed around for collecting donations, and over $500 was collected. That is enough money for one more Pass-It-On award.

Brenda Laurel: Tools for Change: Human-Centered Design Research

Brenda Laurel is a professor in Design at the California College of the Arts and she was an invited technical speaker for this year’s GHC. Brenda structured her talk by giving us a timeline of the different companies she’s worked for (including big names like Atari and Apple) and the projects she’s been a part of. In particular, She gave a description of working on the Purple Moon video games for tweens. Brenda spent a lot of time observing both girls and boys play games and found that boys tended to enjoy overt competition and characters that possessed strength. Girls, on the other hand, enjoyed covert competition and characters that had hidden knowledge or abilities. The Purple Moon games didn’t have a demarkation of winning or losing, but rather allowed the player to influence the world around them, make decisions, and gain skills or knowledge along the way. I never played any of the Purple Moon games that came out in the 90s, but I vaguely remember seeing the games at my friends’ houses. Brenda also discussed the importance of doing human-centered research and design. She said you had to “meet the users where they are” and “leave your preconceptions at the door” when you observed or interviewed your target users. Her discussion of ethnographic techniques really resonated with me, since that is the type of methodology I have used for the projects I’ve been involved with. She also gave a pro-tip about observing users: pay attention to the shoes! The shoes tell you a lot about a person. They tell you what kind of activities they may enjoy, whether they have back problems or other similar difficulties, how much walking they usually do, and the style they want to convey. I’ll have to remember that the next time I do observations for research!

Sponsor Reception

The last night of the conference is celebrated with sponsor night reception. Microsoft and Google handed out t-shirts, Intel raffled off two net-books, Apple gave away a few Macs, and several other big prizes were up for grabs. Unfortunately, I didn’t win any of the big prizes, but I did have a lot of fun. There was more dancing and the VT women, once again, held our place on the dance floor till the very end. I had a blast at GHC 09, and I’m already looking forward to GHC 2010 in Atlanta, GA.