Transforming Grounds

This coming Fall I will teach a new (primarily graduate) course that I will develop over the summer. It is called "The Elements of Interaction" and it is based on my new book "Things That Keep Us Busy--the elements of interaction" (MIT Press 2017). The book is co-authored with my colleague Lars-Erik Janlert. I am quite excited about this new course and I wonder if there are any courses like it out there. If you know, please let me know! And if you are interested or have questions, just email me. Here is a description of the courses (at least as I plan now): The Elements of Interaction We are surrounded by interactive devices, artifacts, and systems. The general assumption is that interactivity is good -- that it is a positive feature associated with being modern, efficient, fast, flexible, and in control. Yet there is no very precise idea of what interaction is and what interactivity means. In this course, we will investigate the elements of interaction and ...

Back home after a few days at CHI in Montreal. Overwhelming. Impressive in size, breadth and culture. A lot can be said about HCI research, how it is changing, where it is moving, based on what happens at CHI. This is why I like to go to CHI. Not the individual papers or presentations, but the chance to get a sense of the whole field. I made one new observation this year. I don't know if it is true or only a result of what I personally happened to listen to and see, but I will share it. I experienced that the research presented at CHI seemed to drift and shift in two distinct ways. I saw more good design based research made by young design oriented researchers that take such an approach to research as given and as legitimate. I also saw more scientific research. People who study interactive technology and systems, but also different forms of interactivity, using traditional scientific methods and approaches. They did this not with the primary purpose of finding or developing ...

I have always been drawn to research that is trying to understand the 'nature' of some phenomenon. There are several reasons for this. I am attracted to the idea that as a researcher I am actually improving my own understanding of the phenomenon I am studying and increasing my ability to explain its nature, and that this knowledge grows over time and is in some sense is cumulative. As a consequence of this, I have had two major research projects during my career. One has been to understand the nature of designing as a human approach to change and the other has been to understand the nature of the interaction between humans and interactive artifacts/systems. I have realized that this aim is commonly confused with a radically different purpose which is to develop support that can improve peoples ability to design new technology and systems. As any kind of basic research, the results it produces will never be able to tell anyone what to design or create. Basic researc...