On Research

The academic world has again entered into my field of vision. Interesting.

After having taken a slight pause with that world, I think I need to make-up my mind on what it is (in high level) that I will be doing there. And I'm not speaking about the content. Yet.

I got inspired by a relatively recent article, boldly called "The Future of Human-Computer Interaction" (2006) by John Canny of UC Berkeley. Despite its grandious name, it's quite sane article, with refreshingly good historical review of where HCI comes from and why things are the way they are now. That part could be also called "The story of WIMP" (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointing).

For future, Canny puts forward two areas of UI development: Context-Awareness and Perceptual Interfaces. Now, these are not new ideas. But what Canny wants to happen with those areas, will not happen overnight. More like in 5-10 years, or even later.

Parallel to the UI development, Canny also touches the topic of roles in a development/research project. Nowadays HCI can be seen as being involved in all the stages of (iterative) (product) development process. As Canny points out, this doesn't mean that HCI people are the (only) ones that can do the development process, but, rather, that the understanding of the HCI needs to be involved/integrated in all the phases.

Ok, so if I were in a Company, this would all be pretty clear by now. No matter what phase of the process, there is work for a user-centred person, at least as a teacher/consultant, if not as active participant.

What about Reseach? It cannot be primarily about creating unique product ideas, because a researcher cannot truly be a concept designer; He lacks the resources of a company (peers, design/implementation team, ability to make real-life products). This approach is still used through joint projects between (several) research organisations and companies. However, with the NDAs, patents and closed development often looming in the horizon, this is not the ideal way of discovering and disseminating science to all of the world.

What a researcher is good at, is sensing/finding out what is happening around the world. And also (especially in user-centred research), interacting with people via research methods such as interviewing, workshops and just getting involved in what users do. Through these activities, it is natural that ideas emerge (rather than researcher just inventing ideas out of the blue). But what to do with the ideas?

The radical (product) ideas can of course take the route of product development in a company, as I described earlier. However, in researchers role, I am more interested in the evolving ideas, because, as Canny says, humans evolve actually very slowly and there's no point in reinventing the UI paradigm every year (in contrast to new mobile phone products every quartal of the year). Moreover, there is awfully lot of technology and tools already available, it is more about discovering how to use/combine existing stuff than actually needing to create totally new and different stuff (e.g. products).

If one is aiming for discovering how to use existing stuff by sensing the world and interacting with people, it is pretty straightforward to engage with communities of people. The community specifies the nature of activities that are carried out and the goal for the activity. Also, communities often have a natural tendency to want to improve themselves, so experimentation is a welcome behaviour. Both the creation of ideas and validation become easier, because they have a clear context: The community itself can also come up with ideas and it either adopts the new ways of activities or it prefers the existing ones.

Opensourcea kansalle

Tässä on pitkästä aikaa päätynyt ATK-tueksi tutuille ihmisille ja onneksi tällä kertaa on ollut mahdollisuus tutustuttaa heidät Ubuntu-linuxin maailmaan, ainaisen Windowsin sijasta. Ja mikä parasta, aloite linuxiin on lähtenyt heistä itsestään! Vihreästi ajattelevia ihmisiä selkeästi kiehtoo mahdollisuus käyttää ilmaiseksi jaettavaa, yhteisöllisesti kehitettyä ohjelmaa.

Siinä missä Windows-maailmassa joutuu käymään ison asennusrumban itse käyttöjärjestelmän asennuksen jälkeen, Ubuntussa muun muassa tekstinkäsittely ja piirto-ohjelmat tulevat valmiina. Erityisenä kompastuskivenä linuxeissa on kuitenkin kolmikko musiikki, videot ja DVD. Onneksi tähän on olemassa suhteellisen vaivaton ratkaisu: Easy Ubuntu.

Kiinnostaako Windowsin sijasta Linux?
1) Lataa Ubuntu asennus CD
2) Tutustu Ubuntuun, esimerkiksi wiki-kirjan avulla.
3) Asenna Easy Ubuntu (ohjeet), jos haluat helposti musiikin, videot ja DVD:t nähtäville.

Hacker for life

After reading the excellent book "Hacker Ethics" by Pekka Himanen, I feel like one of the ways to describe what I really want to do is to "be a Hacker in more areas than just computers/open source". The hacker in there refers directly to the Himanen's description of it, something like: "working passionately on something that one is interested about, and having fun while doing it. Sharing the results with the rest of the world".

Even with the definition of the word hacker, my description is still vague. But it's nonetheless, the starting point I'm going with. And to start with a tradional way, I'm hacking with OpenOffice for Mac OS X :) It is, after all, the area where I began with my university studies.

What this means in other parts of my work life? Well, you'll have to wait and see.