Half-PhD presentation, recap

2010 October 1

Ouf, it’s done! I can now breath a bit and take a day off at least. Many people were present during the presentation, actually the room was packed. Antti Pirhonen (from Jyväskylä, Finland) joined as an external reviewer, while local favourites Anna Valtonen and Daniel Fallman represented my home institution. I tried my best to arrange for my secondary advisor Bill Buxton to visit Umeå for the occasion, but it turned out to be impossible.

The feedback I received was very helpful and constructive. I have to narrow down and select only one area to wrap and finish up my PhD work. As of now, I’m still a too broad and not so precise about my (eventual) contribution: the sketching in hardware as new approach in IxD, reflection + documentation in action as a method to work in design, or contributing with a simple haptic toolkit to the IxD design community? I’ll see what I can do.

Daniel contributed with a nice comment regarding the difference between a sketch and a prototype, and that is mostly relates who is producing, using or testing it. For me, my haptic explorative interfaces are really sketches, because I have been building, changing, modifying, altering them constantly as I move along. But when someone is invited to look at them, and try them out, they tend to be more prototypes as the inscribed evolution or process is not necessarily apparent. For an external person, these sketches, even if they are quite rought and not slick, are more like proposals or rationalized ideas. So the interesting question, is that how to go about keeping sketchy qualities and characteristics as design artefacts are handed-over or experienced by other colleagues/designers. Can your sketch continue to be a sketch for somebody else?

I’m attaching a PDF of my presentation [45MB] for the curious out there. It’s probably very difficult to understand some of it with just the slides. At least it’s something! Thanks to Erik from IxD2 who took some pictures during the presentation.