Recently I get this question more often – especially how to keep up with developments outside the scientific community. Some tell this is not important if you do research, however to me the actual uses are a very important inspirations.
There is no single source but an interesting address in the WWW is textually.org – it is very international and covers much more than technology!
Together with Jonna Hakkila’s group (currently run by Jani Mantyjarvi) we had a two day workshop at Nokia in Oulu discussion the next big thing* 😉
* motto on the Nokia research centers web page
It seems that many people share the observation that emotions and culture play a more and more important role in the design of services and applications – even outside the research labs. One evening we looked for the Finnish experience… (photo by Paul)
Overall the workshop showed again how many ideas can be created in a very short time – hopefully we can follow up some of them and create some new means for communication. We plan to meet again towards the end of the year in Essen.
PS: Kiss the phone – some take it literarily: http://tech.uk.msn.com/news/article.aspx?cp-documentid=7770403
PPS: we talked about unanticipated use (some call it misuse) of technology, e.g. using the camera on the phone to take a picture of the inside of your fridge instead of writing a shopping list. Alternative uses is not restricted to mobile phones – see for yourself what you dishwasher may be good for…. http://www.salon.com/nov96/salmon961118.html
Jonna Hakkila (Nokia), Jani Mantyjarvi (Nokia & VTT), and I discussed last year how we can improve the doctoral studies of our students and we decided to organize a small workshop to discuss PhD topics.
As Jonna is currently on maternity leave and officially not working we ran the workshop at VTT in Oulu.
The topics varied widely from basic user experience to user interface related security. There was very interesting work the participants did and published. I have selected the following 2 as reading suggestions: [1] by Elina Vartiainen and [2] by Anne Kaikkonen.
We hope we gave some advise – can resist to repeat the most important thing to remember:
A good discussion on doing a PhD in computer science by Jakob Bardram can be found at [3].
[1] Roto, V., Popescu, A., Koivisto, A., and Vartiainen, E. 2006. Minimap: a web page visualization method for mobile phones. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 – 27, 2006). CHI ’06. ACM, New York, NY, 35-44. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1124772.1124779
[2] Lehikoinen, J. T. and Kaikkonen, A. 2006. PePe field study: constructing meanings for locations in the context of mobile presence. In Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Helsinki, Finland, September 12 – 15, 2006). MobileHCI ’06, vol. 159. ACM, New York, NY, 53-60. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1152215.1152228
[3] http://www.itu.dk/people/bardram/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.ArtPhD
Christian Kray and I were colleagues in Lancaster for a very short time – he just joined the university when I left for Munich. After his post-doc in Lancaster he moved to a position in Newcastle.
His work at the cross roads of mobile interaction and public displays is very exciting. In particular he investigates interesting concepts related to visual codes – some aspects to these ideas are discussed in “Swiss Army Knife meets Camera Phone” [1]. His new prototypes are really cool and I look forward to see/read more about them.
We realized that there are many areas where we have common interests. Perhaps there is a chance in the future to work together on some of the ideas discussed!
[1] Swiss Army Knife meets Camera Phone: Tool Selection and Interaction using Visual Markers. C. Kray and M. Rohs. (2007) In „Workshop on Mobile Interaction with the Real World at Mobile HCI 2007“. Singapore, September 9, 2007.
Today Matthias Kranz defended his PhD thesis „Engineering Perceptive User Interfaces“ successfully at the University of Munich! Congratulations… and remember „Training to become a Jedi is not an easy challenge. And even if you succeed, it’s a hard life.“ (Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace)
The personalized doctoral hat is a German tradition –and Matthias got a fully functional prototype of a perceptive doctoral hat (following the modification and restriction approach suggested in his thesis, but created without end-user involvement to keep the surprise 😉 Insider hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfilm – just don’t!
Nicolas, who was the first BSc student I worked with in Lancaster, is now after finishing his PhD with Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. He came on Friday to Essen to see the lab and he brought us a Voodoo I/O box [1] – we are really excited!
Some references to remember:
[1] Spiessl, W., Villar, N., Gellersen, H., and Schmidt, A. 2007. VoodooFlash: authoring across physical and digital form. In Proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 15 – 17, 2007). TEI ’07. ACM, New York, NY, 97-100. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1226989