weeknotes: Shenzhen, Scalable HCI Symposium

Phew, this was a busy week! I’ll keep this post brief, since I was mostly attending a symposium and getting my bearings.

The week started with the Scalable HCI Symposium at SUSTech, a university in Shenzhen.

I might keep this a little short, because I’ve already written about it over here!

Navigating mainland China, I learned how to get Luckin to produce a coffee for me (you don’t talk to anyone, you just use an app and then can pick up a $1.50, perfectly fine latte)

At the symposium, I showed my poster about drawing robin eyebrows. I kinda love the more open academic conferences, where I don’t feel I need to follow a scientific format if that doesn’t represent the content well…

Phew, this was a busy week! I’m just going to have this post be a list of things, because mostly I was at the Scalable HCI Symposium and getting my bearings. I’ve also already written about it over here!

I started figuring out how to navigate mainland China. I learned how to get Luckin to produce a coffee for me (you don’t talk to anyone, you just use a WeChat app, pay around $1.50, and then pick up a perfectly fine latte.) I figured out Taobao, but kept getting flagged because I would leave my VPN on.

At the symposium, I showed my poster about drawing robin eyebrows.

We visited factories. One showed how it could produce your microchips enclosed in some injected-molded plastic, which accounts for a huge number of consumer products if you think about it.

We visited HQB, the huge electronics market. There were lots of AI glasses, Dyson hair dryers, novelty cameras that would print on thermal paper, and also some spooky signal jamming devices. More useful for me were the stalls that sold components for microelectronics. Instead of waiting a week to see if a button is the right size, you could just click a bunch of different buttons and buy a sample of the one you wanted to use.

Then we reached the weekend, and I caught a cold and hunkered down for a few days. I did manage to walk through some parks, though. There were lots of advertisements for birds in the subways, and the Mangrove Ecological Park had very cute placards.