MA thesis work

I haven't really posted things about my degree work here on the blog, as I mostly use SlideShare to share my presentations...So far we had three of them:

The kick-off, end of January:



A research presentation, end of February:

The mid-review, end of March:

a workshop on workshops

This morning we had a workshop on how to conduct a workshop. It ended up being more like an open lecture/discussion with input from all participants. Main outcome: There is no other way learning how to do a good workshop than doing a workshop. One nice book-resource many people may not know (at least i didn't ;)

"The Idea Agent" by  Jonas Michanek and Andréas Breiler...There is also a homepage about it here

planet eyeth

The last project we finished before the summer-break was a service-design project about language learning.

My team ended up doing a service which functions as a hub for people concerned with the topic of deafness or hardness-of-hearing. The service is build upon social local networks, which facilitate information sharing within Deaf communities. It supports the existing, rich culture with tools which connects hearing, deaf and hard-of-hearing people on a local level. By providing a web- and a mobile app, it makes it easier for people to get in contact and take first steps in this diverse world.

This video shows some of the impressions of the meetings that do already exist and our service makes more people aware of.



One result of our project was a detailed blueprint and ideas how a mobile and a web touchpoint could work and look like.

As the project was sponsored by Microsoft, we took the chance to look into the styleguides of WindowsPhone applications.

To see more details on the project, pleas check back on my portfolio this summer :)

Language as participation

As we are pretty busy with our current project I don't really get round to write on my blog. Still I wanted to share some insights from our current process. We are doing a service-design project on the topic of "Language as participation"

We spent the first two weeks doing intense design-ethnography. The whole class conducted interviews around the topic of language learning. Our interviewees were students, immigrants, refugees, teachers, language and dialect specialists..Our focus was to find out about how learning works in everyday life's situations and encounters. We mapped out our interviewees "journeys" of learning or teaching foreign languages (mostly Swedish) and started to analyse the material in a number of synthesis sessions.

In a two-day workshop we draw conclusions by creating posters on which we mapped the most important themes in language learning. For instance, cross-generational learning plays a big role in a lot of people's life's: It happens as soon as kids, their parents and maybe their grandparents speak different languages natively and by that learn from each other. Sometimes there are two native languages (from mother and father) plus their shared language (often English) plus an additional language of the country the family lives in involved.

After splitting up in smaller groups of two - three students, we started to think about focus areas. I teamed up with my classmates Adam (Swedish) and Jules (Dutch) as we shared the interest in the different learning channels. There are different types of learners: auditive, visual, kinesthetic and tactile learners. Most people learn the most effective by having an individual mix of learning methods, probably with a focus on one of them. That's when we started to ask ourselves what would happen if you take away the access to one learning channel? If born deaf the auditive channel is very limited or even not available. We started to look into the topic of Sign-language and decided to focus on it for the rest of the project.

In one more week we explored a lot about the topic, read a lot of articles, papers and stories from deaf people as well as relatives and experts.

We prepared a workshop with our class, our tutors and teachers to get ideas from people who have no or only little knowledge about the topic and approach it completely un-biased.

Yesterday we started a number of interviews with people who are in touch with Sign-language: educators, speech therapists, interpreters, users of Sign-languages. It is an extremely interesting but very challenging topic at the same time. For now, we have no idea what we could come up with, as there is still a lot to learn and to narrow down. One thing we decided though: We will do a service for parents who rear a deaf kid and have to learn Sign-language because of that.

Police Command & Communication Center - research

The project started with a introductory visit to the Command and Communication Center (CCC) in Umeå. Being a rather small center it is still representative for a pretty modern working environment.






In a couple of sessions we conducted an extensive research by shadowing and interviewing the so called "dispatchers".

The working stations of the dispatchers contain tons of equipment: radio, telephone paper work and, most important for us, a PC workstation with an interface on 3-5 widescreen monitors. The dispatchers workload reaches from idle time to extremely stressful peaks were they have to handle multiple tasks at once (some former dispatchers now work as fighter jet pilots).
Of many hundred applicants a year only about three to four are suitable for the job. Mostly women.

The first challenge was to understand the whole system of emergency calls, managing ressources and dispatching patrols. It is a very complex system witch even more complex decision-making processes.


We got a deep insight on as the police officers patiently explained almost every detail. We had the chance to visit the CCC a couple of times, so we were able to build on a well-founded knowledge.

After the first week of research, the class of 11 students split up in three groups based on different opportunity areas.







I decided to team up with Siri, Ayse and Shelagh to work on the area we called "cooperative environment". We saw big potential in taking the whole CCC as a system to improve not only focusing on the screens itself.

Analyzing the interaction workflow was important to understand the interface and all peripherals in detail. The analysis revealed many opportunities and potentials for improvements, as shown later.

One excerpt of our analysis: The interaction flow during the case of a hit reindeer (which is super-kliché but very common in northern sweden) As you see, the dispatcher has to go crazy in the interface, as he needs to switch between three monitors all the time. This means turning the head a lot of times, and travelling (literally) meters with the cursor.