So, I have some news — eight months after rocking up to Newcastle University, I’m returning to the south of England. I’m looking forward to the new things ahead, but I remain inspired by the breadth and quality of the work that goes on here in Newcastle. I’d like to illustrate what I mean:

A week or two ago, I hosted a visitor from N8, a group of eight research-focused universities in the north of England. Our guest wanted to know about assistive technologies, and of course there’s plenty of that going on. I was able to take him through a good half a dozen demos:

• the Ambient Kitchen (of course!), originally built as an assistive environment for people with dementia
• Chequemates, banking for the elderly
• cueing swallowing for people with Parkinson’s disease
• digital technologies for Play Therapy
• technology to help pupils and teachers (at a school for children with special needs) share decisions about in-class photo displays
• the OpenMovement work behind the WAX (wireless accelerometer) sensors

The visitor was only with us for a couple of hours, and walked away full of ideas and enthusiasm — and a wealth of information to digest. It reminded me of my first visit to Culture Lab in October last year, and also brought to mind the astonishing amount of work that we took to CHI’12 (pdf booklet). Like I say: I have a tremendous respect for the work that gets done in Culture Lab. And I’ll miss my colleagues.

As to my future steps, I’ll talk about those in a future post…