It seems it’s conference season. My colleague, Dagmar Steffen, is organising the DeSForM 2010, the 6th International Workshop on Design Semantics of Form and Movement held here in Luzern in November. Registrations are still open and it would greatly help the planning if they were not all last minute! (I know I’m a terrible last minute attendee to these things).

Luzern is a lovely city to visit and the program has some great highlights. Here is the info:

We invite you to DeSForM 2010, the 6th International Workshop on Design Semantics of Form and Movement.

The event takes place November, 3-5 at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, Switzerland.

The program includes keynotes by:

• Sevil Peach, SPGA London/ UK
• Johan Redström, Interactive Institute, Kista/ Sweden
• Stuart Walker, Imagination Lancaster, Lancaster University/ UK

Excursions include visiting the Net’n'Nest Office at Vitra, Weil am Rhein, and the Designers’ Saturday in Langenthal.

Further information on the DeSForM site and you can register online here.

We look forward to welcoming you in Lucerne!

Congratulations to one of my MA students at Luzern, Othmar Mühlebach, who has just won the second prize at the Berner Design Awards for his toaster re-design. Based on the idea of a printer, you lay a stack of bread at the top and each slice runs through the toaster.

Given the trend for burning designs onto toast, I expect Othmar’s design could be modified to burn any kind of graphic. Might overheat the USB cable though.

Regular readers of Playpen may have notice things have been somewhat quiet around here recently. There are two reasons for this. One is that Twitter has made an unexpected impact on my blogging. I was quite surprised by this, because it is somewhat of a symbiotic relationship, especially as my tweets are over there in the sidebar. I am yet to make a judgement about whether it is a positive thing that I can comment on something in 140 characters or whether it shows an ever diminishing level of caring about putting together a coherent piece of writing. I’m sure this has affected others out there – has twittering bled your blog dry?

The other, rather more exciting reason, is that I started a new post as a Research Fellow/Lecturer (professor with a small p to you folks in the USA) in Service Design at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, part of the Hochschule Luzern in Switzerland. As the title suggests, it is a mix of research and teaching. I am predominantly teaching on the Masters of Product Design and Management, but dip into a couple of BA courses too.

So, expect the posts here to tend a bit more towards services, but I have long seen interaction/experience design with the broader lens that service design affords, so I don’t imagine the content will radically change. Diving headlong into the bureaucracy that working in a public education institution, in another country (especially Switzerland) entails is in itself a pretty good opportunity to experience the complexity of service offerings both good and bad.