Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.

Posts Tagged ‘waiting’

Home, kind of…

In Weblog on 14 August 2006 tagged London, moving, Photos, Travel, waiting, Weblog with 1 comment

I'm back from the U.S.

Photos of the trip are up on Flickr (along with photos from the UCL Waiting Workshop and Futuresonic 10) and loosely grouped into sets.

What a trip - it's taking me a little while to adjust back to London life though.  Not just the jetlag, but also the fact that I moved house just before I left and I'm still living out of boxes and bags until I get furniture organised.  Once broadband is up and running I'll try and flesh out my thoughts on Chicago, New York, Boston and the U.S. in general.

Why Wait?

In Weblog on 18 July 2006 tagged Events, London, time, ucl, waiting, Weblog, why-wait? with 2 comments

Abstracts and attendees are now online for Why Wait?, a workshop being held at UCL next week.

Here's a summary of what I'm thinking about in this area:

There are several ways to manage a waiting process (e.g. numbered tickets at the cheese counter or single queues for multiple service points at the post office). These methods can be objectively measured; the effect on waiting times and processing rates can be quantified. But the effect on the experience of waiting is less objective and cannot easily be measured. How might we better understand these issues, in particular the perception of fairness, to design better waiting experiences that are optimal not only in their use of resources but also in their impact on the people who are waiting?

Nice to note that Dave Chatting will be attending. My brief conversation with Dave about our shared interest in time-based maps led to a couple of interesting posts on Computing for Emergent Architecture. It will be good to pick up that discussion again.