Thanks to Selcuk Artut at Sabanci University, I had the opportunity to go to Istanbul last month to give a workshop based on Making Things Talk. It was a really great trip. The workshop blog contains links to the parts used, and a resource blog for interaction designers in Turkish.
Istanbul is an incredible city, large, energetic, dense, sprawling, and beautiful. Well worth seeing. My touristy pics are online on Flickr. I was particularly struck by the large number of cats all around the city. The workshop attendees were wonderful. They were energetic, patient with the loads of material I threw at them, and creative in their use of the stuff. I had a really great time working and visiting with them all. There were a number of great project ideas that came out of the three days we spent together.
I also got to hear some of Selcuk’s band, Replikas, which I highly recommend. Been stuck in my iPod since I got back. Sadly, they weren’t playing any gigs while I was there, so I’ll have to go back.
A few other links from the trip:
Newspaperbox, a project from Selcuk’s department is a news aggregator that uses tree maps in an interesting way to suggest a newspaper layout, but give information about the length and import of the stories in a useful way.
Yeni (New), a performance piece by Genco Gülan, that we saw on my last night there. It was visually stunning, pix on the flickr site above.
Overall, a wonderful trip and one I hope to repeat someday. Belated thanks to Selcuk and Sila for their incredible hospitality, Mustafa and Osman for showing me around Sabanci and the city, and everyone else who I met on the trip.