Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

The big move, working at Philips, and CHI

September 11th, 2009, posted in Conferences, Internal Stuff, Research, innovation

So it’s been a long while since I’ve taken the time to blog.  I never thought it would let it go this long, but here we are with a big several-month-long gap in blogging.  Essentially the 3 big things that have and are happening are what are in the title, the move, working at Philips, and working on CHI2010-2011.

I blogged previously about being the preferred candidate, and when I was later offered the position outright I accepted.  Then, even after buying tickets and scheduling movers we got the news that my visa/work permit had not come through.  This was in late April with a May 15th starting date.  It threw us back into limbo while Philips tried to work things out.  After much travail we were able to get everything worked out by Late June, so we chose August 1st as a start date.  So we flew out on July 29th and stayed in a temporary apartment for a few weeks while we found a house.  There was much hullabaloo about finding the right place, and then our stuff was stuck in customs forcing us to stay in the apartment longer, but in the end we’re finally settled in more or less.

Working at Philips has been an interesting experience.  Some of the bigger challenges are involved with the fact that I started on Aug 1.  For those who are not familiar with how much of western Europe works late July and August are the vacation (though they are more like to say holiday) period.  My supervisor here was gone for the entire month plus some, my line manager here also gone for most of the month.  As I walked down the hall of my floor in building 34 on the beautiful high tech campus I saw many of them empty each day.  I’ve never worked at one of the really large corporations or one that has been around for decades upon decades.  While I’m sure they’re not all like this, it’s pretty crazy how much bureaucracy there is.  In many ways one part of the company has no idea what another part is doing.  A very funny thing happened where I corresponded with the human resources department.  As a series of people from different departments came and went from vacation,  and changes in job function a huge misunderstanding came about.  A concerned HR supervisor type person asked me for a meeting over in the building not too far from mine.  After a few minutes of chit-chat he came down to the question, and in a matter of perhaps 15 seconds the whole thing was cleared up and we both laughed.  We both kept on laughing as we thanked each other for a fun and easy meeting, and we did it again via email.  Almost all these kinds of incidents have happy endings, like when I called the IT helpdesk “engineer” who insisted that the exchange server name I needed to set up mail on my ipod touch didn’t need a top level domain (tld) in order for it to work.  Of course that is true on a local network, but I would certainly be taking my handy portable device many places, and even on campus the wireless is outside of the intranet here so yah nice.  He insisted that the iphone was not supported so there was little he could do but he pointed me to a site that was designed to help Windoze mobile users set up their phones after 10 mins on the phone.  Within a minute I found the super secret information I needed (www.mail.philips com, shockingly difficult stuff) and it worked perfectly.  So yes it all does work in the end, but I ask at what cost?  I guess that is part of my research, which I will certainly blog more about in the future.

CHI, the premiere venue for those working and researching the topic of Human Computer Interaction is a fun dynamic conference.  One visit in 2006 to the annual conference in San Jose and I was hooked.  Now I’ve been asked to help organize the student volunteers for the conference in 2010-2011  (Incidentally you can now register for the lottery for 2010).  It’s been a blast to be on the organizing committees for these two conferences and get a peak at the tremendous amount of work that it takes to pull a conference like this together.  Of course with all that organizing I have perhaps let my own preparation for my submissions suffer a little, but hopefully I’ll still have something to present.

So these are the three things that have been taking my time lately, keeping me away from blogging, but I am sure to be more prolific in the near future.

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Does Design Thinking=Market Research?

November 20th, 2008, posted in Design, Research

While reading a fine article over at BrandWeek I noticed this:

Similarly,  Tim Leberecht, vp of marketing and communications at Frog Design, San Francisco, said he believed there was nothing new about DT. “Doing in-depth research, that’s what marketers have done for decades,” he said. Leberecht conceded that having customers along for the ride during the creative process  is new, but is more the result of the craze over crowdsourcing than for DT, per se.

DT in this context is Design Thinking of course.  This is an interesting concept.  Predictably I don’t have enough time to go back and do the historical research and say whether he Tim is right or not, I don’t think, however that what he refers to as having customers along for the the ride is as trivial a difference as he seems to think.  He attributes this to the craze over crowdsourcing.  I assume he means that this is a fad, just one that will go away like any other fad.

I do not think that the human-centered ethos that design thinking brings with it is a mere triviality.  I think it is important, and will in fact prove to be the key differentiator in terms of results and value both economic and human.

Economic value: Market research HAS been around for ages and best practices are widely available and are usually instituted leaving little differentiation.  DT can differentiate an organization that uses it internally by creating a better working environment, and can differentiate products and services by creating things that fit with human needs and that are beautiful.

Human Value: Market research is oriented towards seeing a hole in a marketplace, see where opportunity is, and to use the most common parlance “make people want to buy stuff” perhaps stuff they don’t even really need.  Design Thinking on the other hand is steeped in a human-centered ethos that creates stuff that fits a need, and in my opinion, fits the needs of humanity/society.  Many designers are creating products, services, and accompanying systems that are green or sustainable (no I’m not going to unpack that loaded term) so that while they make things that are great for individuals, they are also making things that are good for everyone too.  This is a great example of a human value that DT can bring to the marketplace, not because it’s popular, but because it’s the right thing to do and people want to do, they just don’t have good ways to do it.

OK so maybe I got a little bit on my soap box, but I think my point came through.

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Capstone: coming soon

June 14th, 2008, posted in Research, User Experience

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.

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Usability studies on a book?! YES! from UXmatters

May 8th, 2008, posted in Research, Usability, User Experience

 From UXMatters

This is an interview from a new publisher who is printing books in the UX and Usability area.  They conducted a Usability study on a book, yes a printed book.  It just goes to show what you think you know about how people use and own things is not usually true.  User studies of all kinds will give you valuable data on all these kinds of things.  Does anyone think Amazon did this with the Kindle? Some maybe, clearly not a lot.

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Open Letter to Annual Conference Organizers

April 22nd, 2008, posted in Conferences, Grad School, Research

Dear Conference Organizers:

First of all, thank you for all your hard work and dedication. I know you don’t have to volunteer and put on a conference for all your peers and those aspiring to be your peers. I also know that your taking time to do so will distract from your regular work, whether it be research, teaching, or what have you, so again thanks. I am not writing this to just say thank you though, I have a few complaints.

Website URL:

It is actually much easier to find the conference if there is one website for the organizing organization that puts on the conference that then links and or hosts the conference pages for each year. I have often seen that a department, faculty, school, or univeristy will organize a conference and then not too long afterwards the site gets taken down, or I will find the 1998 conference site for the conference I am looking for. I like the historical aspect of seeing old websites, I really do, but unless it point to current resources as well it’s fairly useless in the longrun. What I propose is this, coolconference.org as the main website and then do 2007.coolconference.org or coolconference.org/2007. This is a good idea if the conference does not spring out of a strong organizing group, but if you have one where the website is active I would say do this: groupsite.org/conferencename/2008, and you could make groupsite.org/conference default to the current year but have all the other years accessible.

Website Design:

Please, oh please, grab as volunteer who knows website design and have them use a nice CSS template. So many are free and many more are $50-100. It’s so worth it. CSS makes it awfully easy to make webpages look consistent, and it’s easy for anyone to create new pages with new content in something like dreamweaver or contribute. Even better, choose a template that works with WordPress and do the whole thing in wordpress, it works amazingly well.

Expect further additions, but for now that is all I have to say. Thank you very much.

Sincereley,

Aaron Houssian

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