I’m George’s Blog

The job descriptions for two vacancies within my department at the Royal College of Art are finally up. If you’re interested, or know anyone else that would be, please take a look at the current vacancies page.

Head of Department, Interaction Design

Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art has a leading reputation for advanced and innovative practice, teaching and research. It is interdisciplinary, with staff and students from a wide range of backgrounds in art and design as well as human sciences and engineering. It has a research group with a wide range of institutional and industrial research partners and affiliates. In parallel with its research activity, the department runs a two-year multi-disciplinary Masters course in interaction design with thirty students, the graduates of which are much in demand.

As the Head of Department you will be responsible for academic policy and direction, staff management, teaching, learning and research standards. You will have an established reputation in the discipline of interaction design and the ability to provide energetic leadership and professional vision in a demanding academic environment. You will also have a combination of skills and experience acquired in both academic and professional contexts which provide the competence to fulfil the managerial, teaching and research aspects of the role.

Part-time Assistant Network Manager, Interaction Design

Interaction Design has a well-resourced studio with a network of 40 Macintosh and PC computers and associated peripherals and video equipment. Each student and staff member has their own computer and in addition there are shared machines for specific applications such as video grabbing and scanning.

This post is for two days a week.

The Part-time Assistant Network Manager will assist the Network Manager in providing the overall technical infrastructure to support the research and teaching of the department. The post has a particular focus in supporting the online presence of the department’s researchers and students.

As part of a continuing aim to publishing as much unobtrusively gathered data about myself online, I’ve added links to my AudioScrobbler profile and Amazon Wish List in the sidebar. Both need some more input to give you a better picture so from now on I’ll keep you in mind whenever I’m sifting though Amazon.

If you’re not familiar with AudioScrobbler you really should take a look and then try out Last.fm, both are exemplary examples of calculated inference based on large datasets gathered unobtrusively (as well as being a great way to find your idea of good music).

Finally, this blog is also now available through the London Bloggers site, an interesting way to find new blogs or locate people you feel like you know geographically.

Last night I got my first comment spam which felt like passing my initiation into the blogging world. Needless to say, said comment was quickly removed and the steps outlined in the Movable Type Guide to Fighting Comment Spam were followed. They haven’t updated it to include a link to the nofollow plug-in yet which is also thoroughly recommended. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for something to make it through the net.