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IxDA Limerick – the first meetup this autumn

Back in the autumn of 2009, together with Marc McLoughlin (then PhD student and research assistant at the Interaction Design Centre), we started the Limerick chapter of the Interaction Design Organisation.

After three years of activity,  meetup.com displays 103 members, 22 meetups and 10 reviews for IxDA Limerick.
We had an impressive number of invited speakers, networking events and workshops. Two of our members organised the first Design Jam in Ireland this spring. Together with milklabs, the Limerick hackerspace, we organised the first series of  Ignite talks in Limerick.

At the moment, we are in the process of collating all the information we have on meetup.com on an independent website.
Alan Ryan, who is doing an internship at the Interaction Design Centre at the moment,  joined me as event co-organiser for this first event.

I would like to renew my invitation for the members who would like to get involved in the organisation of this local chapter of the IxDA to step forward. We’re looking for new ideas, new activities, new people to run theLimerick chapter of IxDA. We’re looking for more practitioners to join our ranks and lead the conversation.

The meetup on Wednesday opened this year’s series and was scheduled as part of the Design Week.

As the speaker we had in mind couldn’t make it for Design Week, we decided to take the opportunity to present our own work in progress:

Urban Social Technologies are information and communication technologies applied in an urban setting and with a social purpose (Pedersen and Vallgarda, 2004). Emerging at the intersection of Social Media with Ubiquitous Computing and enabled by the wide scale adoption of smartphones, Urban Social Technologies are increasingly pervading our lives. The effects are multifold and invite to reflection. A presentation by a team of researchers and students from the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick will provide the material meant to trigger a conversation on the participants’ practices and opinions related to location-based practices, with a special focus on the Limerick urban space.

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IxDA Limerick Nov meetup, a set on Flickr.

We couldn’t have wished for a better group of attendees on the night! We had a very interesting mix of people from various backgrounds, although current and former IMedia students formed the majority. The big map of Limerick we borrowed from Limerick Smarter Travel  was excellent for triggering memories related to places and supporting the conversation.

November 12 2012 | Events and IxDA and SmarterTravel | No Comments »