This is the way we study... ;)

...or just showing off. ;D We have a nice ping pong table at the lobby and yesterday we had fun time playing it together. We also tried this version where everybody runs around the table and tryes to hit the ball by turns. The trueth anyway is that there has been lot of lectures and sitting...and long days. Today I came home at quarter past seven. Mostly they have been quite tiresome infolectures about the schools systems etc. In three weeks we will start the actual courses. These first four weeks we have introduction lectures.

By the way, I did set up my account for computers at school and selected the background image. Ah, I still miss Austria!!! This is the river behind the school in Puch Urstein. PUCH!!! <3

The wheel chair in the picture above was used today when we had the most interesting lecture so far about usability. We have a teacher who is totally deaf. He can't hear anything but he can talk and "listen to us" with help of interpreter. He had borrowed wheel chairs, some adjustement glasses from The Service and Activity Centre for the Visually Impaired people Iris and also some good ear blugs etc.

So the idea was that we all got to try how it feels to have some kind of disability this morning. Some of us had not good hearing or vision...some were sitting in wheel chair and there was also a person whose fingers did not work because of rheumatism. The task was to find our way in the school from place a to b and make notes about things that we found difficult. I had glasses which made me blind in terms of the definition of blindness. But actually I could see something but not very well. I quess that some people who have definition of blind in Finland can then see something. My friend in the group had a tunnel vision...(she had different kind of glasses then me)

I could not read text if I was not standing very near and the letters had to be very big. It really pointed out the importance of contrast and colors in signs. The importance of design. We also recognised that in the elevators there should be voice note when you arrive to a specific floor. There was many things that were not very well planned in our school if you have special needs. After the session we talked about the things everybody found out and our feelings of beeing disabled. We also tryed to find ways to think solutions.

At the end the teacher talked us about thinking and using testing methods in our own projects in multimedia - about accessability and usability in the devices we will make in the future.

Chanching the subject: a few pictures from yesterday. I was in a boat called Väiski in Hakaniemi, Helsinki with class mates. They arrange once a year this party for all art schools in Helsinki. There were people from the Music Academy (Sibelius akatemia) the Theater Academy (Teatterikorkakoulu) and the University of Fine Arts (Kuvataideakatemia) and from our school: the University of Art and Design (Taideteollinen korkeakoulu). It is nice that we are having this group atmoshere in the class which I have not experienced after primary school. But the party itself was not that huge. Many people left early home...even if some people wouldn't quess, but students seem to take studies seriously in the art field. So not just hanging around every evening eating cheese and drinking wine in weird clothes having paint all around them. ;)

This morning we were sitting punctually at the class room listening the lecture.