February 27, 2004

A Useful Weblog?

To avoid the embarrasment of being caught by flatmates dancing around my room singing, 'Huzzah! Huzzah! The Drift Table, she comes today!' I thought I'd sit down to write a final pre-Table post.

Barry, the chap who fixed me up with the Table and will be charting my responses to it, was talking last night about weblogs in an academic context (he's not fond, since the lack of peer review can cause shit to float, so to speak) and it occured that they are ideally suited to a project like this.

I don't pretend to understand quite what Barry and his fellow Equator project people are up to, but when it comes to researching the way folk respond to electronic furniture prototypes, the weblog is a peculiarly useful medium. (I can't believe I just wrote that sentence, but bear with me.) Without this site, Barry would have to interview me, or ask me to write up some thoughts about my time with the Table. Since I am keeping a weblog here, by the end of my six week stint he'll have a useful (I hope) chunk of data that, importantly I think, has been recorded over time, as and when the Table provokes me to post.

With that in mind, I'll see if Barry and the other participants in the trial are amenable to keeping the site going after the Table is cruelly wrenched from my grasp in six weeks time. Things could certinaly get interesting if Barry were to post his responses to the responses of his guinea pigs, if you catch my, um, drift.

Finally, I've been remiss in not extending my thanks to Bill Gaver and the RCA folk for making the table, and the Equator gang for making it available for me to play with. So: thank you!

Update: The Table has broken again, and so won't be installed until Monday afternoon. Bugger.

Posted by Jack on February 27, 2004 10:33 AM
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