Sponsorship

For those that don't know, Mangold Interact is a powerful video analysis package that allows you to code and analyse your data (for an overview see http://www.mangold.de/english/). It is ideally suited to looking at Design protocols. For this reason I asked the head of the company - Pascal Mangold - whether he'd be interested in sponsoring DTRS7 and I got an extremely enthusiastic reply:

"This sounds wonderful!!

"Especially because yesterday we had a big meeting about our own conference which is about "Methods in behavioral research". I came up with this idea 2 years ago because we - as vendor of systems for behavioral research - see lots of people "re-inventing the wheel" again and again because they don't know that others already have worked out good methods for this and that. The idea of this conference is mainly to provide 'interdisciplinary knowledge about methods in behavioral research'.

"If I understood your intention correctly, your conference fits ideally (in a certain angle) into our ideas.

"That's why I would be happy to sponsor the technical basis for this contest! Thus everyone would be able to start at the same level and the data would be easily comparable. This is highly exciting... and I'm very curious about the outcome!"

I asked if he'd give a discount or a free trial period for participants to DTRS7 who don't (yet) have the software, and also if he'd like to give a talk or workshop on using the software / analysing the data at the symposium itself. I didn't get a concrete reply here but will follow this up.

I think by giving the option of using similar software for analysis the discussion could be even more focussed at the event.

Book Titles

Following on from the last meeting at Reading Peter and Janet came up with the following suggestions for book titles:

(a) Re : Design - What goes on in Design Meetings

(b) Talking of Design - What goes on in Design Meetings

(c) The Design Agenda - What goes on in Design Meetings

(d) About Design - What goes on in Design Meetings

We were pretty happy with the subtitle, hence the lack of an alternative. (a) and (d) were both plays on the subject of an actual meeting.

The alternatives were circulated on email and the following comments were made.

Rachael: A personal preference for title (b) Talking of Design as this reflects the verbal aspects of designing (and the conversation analysis method in particular), though the other titles have a broader appeal.

Nigel: 'Re: design' suggests 're-design' which might give wrong idea of what's going on? 'Talking of design' implies an emphasis on the talking part - which may not turn out to be what some find significant. 'The design agenda' is already a title of a management book by Rachel Cooper & Mike Press.
So that leaves 'About design', which is OK with me, but might be modified to 'About designing'?

Fraser: my vote would have gone with the 'Design Agenda' title, had that not been bagged already. I also agree that 'Talking of Design' could give too narrow an interpretation, and the problems over the 'Re:' in 'Re: Design'. So my vote goes to 'About Design'.

Peter: I'm happy with 'about design' but like the way that the colon emphasises a sort of agenda. I also like the look of the colon on the page. I think Nigel's adding the 'ing' suggestion is good as it means there is a double play. The meeting agenda idea, but also all the things that are about (i.e. around or round about) designing, so things that you might not normally consider to be designing.

So my conclusion would be:

About : Designing - What Goes on in Design Meetings