the story of a Masters Thesis for Interaction Design in Malmö Sweden

Wow, where does the time go… A short summary so far…

Late 2009 – January 2010

• Loosely thought about thesis while finishing other classes last semester.
• Prepared for TRKBRD conference presentation: upgraded hardware, upgraded software, rebuilt Flash interface (with help), wrote presentation, built slides for presentation.

February 2010

• Presented TRKBRD at IxDA’s Interaction ’10 conference. Gained interest and some feedback on the idea. Overall, not sure how much I gained regarding my thesis, from the conference. Of course I gained inspiration from the conference, but I was hoping to talk with more designers about my thesis idea. I mentioned it during my Q&A after my presentation, and no one told me it was stupid. A few people did mention afterwards that they were interested in what I find from the thesis.
• Spent a few weeks back home, visiting friends and family.
• Started to “hit the wall” with my thesis idea, and begin to lose hope, focus, energy…

March 2010…

• 11 days into the month…
• I have started to have renewed energy and hope, but still working on focus.
• When I thought I was collapsing from the weight of finding redundant research, Jörn, my advisor, attempted to life me back up again with the advice of “Don’t worry about that.” Surprisingly, that helped.
  • Stand on the shoulders of the research I find. Learn from them, what they have already accomplished. It just means that someone has already done research that I don’t have to do now! Sweet!
  • What new context can be derived? What is something new that can be delivered?
  • Zoom out. Big picture.
• Reading, annotating, processing, and blogging all of the research I have collected thus far. (see Research category link on the side, and ALL CAPS tags in tag cloud)
• There is a wedge of originality in what I have collected so far, I can feel it, though it hasn’t emerged yet. I am collecting research from a variety of angles, which occassionally merge and overlap creating a spider web of cross-references from the duplicate references they each reference.
• Will attempt to visualize the research I have collected so far.
  • 1st attempt: I used ALL CAPS tags in my blog tag cloud for tags describing research. I even manually put a yellow background on these words too. This will help me quickly find all the research for a given tag.
  • 2nd attempt: I want to see what other relations can be derived from the tags. Will this help me find my “wedge of originality”?
• From there, I will brainstorm possible physical prototypes that can be built and tested.
• Also want to spend time making an explanatory video for my thesis, physical prototypes, and testing outcomes.