Designing for Experience

Well it has been a long time coming, but I finally have a beta version of my blog up. I wanted to move my professional website away from my personal one, and continue to blog about professional things. I intend to keep a personal blog separate from this one. I am looking for feedback

Why?

I wanted a a domain name and blog to reflect not just who I am, but what I do. I will certainly post more about this at a later, but I just wanted to get this new wordpress install up and start getting feedback.

Feedback

Please post in comments or email me feedback you have. This is, of course, an iterative design, and I’ll write about why I chose some features of the website later.

I am amazed at how much my research interests have changed over the course of the last year. I was dead set on serious games as the area of my research. I wanted to study them and design them, understand the philosophy behind them, and create and test design principles of them. I guess though, in some ways they have not changed that much, what I am still interested in is critical thinking about technology, and its design.

I am interested not just in the technologies themselves, but how people use them, where they use them, and what the experience of using them means to those people. We could talk about it in terms of the User Experience (UX) of technology.

So I’m moving forward with my capstone on the UX of so-called casual games.

Where will I go from there? I don’t know, but I need to write a thesis proposal for applications to PhD programs in Europe, and I’m torn on which direction to head. I still have energy around writing a philosophical perspective on the community of practice that centers around SIGCHI, but have not as of yet found a supervisor for such research, let alone open positions. So the search goes on.