Ken, Dick and others,

Dick and also Ken asked us to send descriptions of our PhD projects, to provide 
some material for discussion, I would guess. Considering Dicks distinction 
between the different phases of graduate studies I should say that I'm about to 
finish my Licentiate thesis, which is a Swedish degree in the middle between the 
Master and the PhD. Finishing that will give me a raise... 

First you should know that my background is in cognitive science in general and 
cognitive anthropology (or distributed cognition) in particular. I finally ended 
up with a master of social science in cognitive science with a specialisation 
towards interaction design. (Isn't that a weird combination!?)

My masters project was a work for Nokia Home Communications (or Nokia Multimedia 
Terminals as they were called during that year) on how to provide shared 
feedback from an interactive television application to a party of people in 
front of the screen. As an illustrative case I designed and evaluated an 
iTV-based quiz game.

To grasp the description of my work you have to understand that I mainly work in 
the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). I try to question some of the 
theories about usage quality that are most widely used within both research and 
practice of interaction design (but also other parts of HCI). I also try to 
develop theories that are supposed to be in use. That is: for every theory there 
are ways to employ them in a design practice. I also use this as part of my 
teaching at the undergraduate level in our interaction design studio. 20%, 
perhaps a little more than that, of my work is teaching and the rest is devoted 
to taking PhD-courses and doing research. The interaction design courses that we 
give are closely connected to the research that is going at our division at the 
Dept. of Computer and Information Science.

And now to something completely different: The description (cut and pasted from 
another document).

"How can people share IT-artifacts and use them together? That main question 
will be broken down to smaller questions and examined by designing and analysing 
a number of different alternatives that will be placed in use in order to assess 
their usage quality.

Previous research within the field of human-machine interaction, particularly 
distributed cognition and cognitive systems engineering, has been directed at 
how human-machine ensembles work in consort to reach practical goals. This 
project wishes to extend theory and practice of those areas to learn how such 
ensembles can work together to reach _social_ goals of togetherness, 
belongingness and mutual interaction among individuals. Such questions have 
previously hardly been scrutinised within any of the design sciences."

If you have questions about my work please mail or call me. I'm sure the 
description of what I do will change several times before I've finally written 
the thesis. But as we all know: It's all rationalised and constructed in 
hindsight... ;-)

// Mattias

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| Mattias Arvola, Doctoral student
| Linköpings universitet, Human-Centered Systems                   
| Dept. of Computer and Information Science       
| SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden
| http://www.ida.liu.se/~matar	tel: +46 13 285626
+---------------------------------------------------