My research interests are within the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design (ID). I have worked on the following themes of projects,

- Experience-Centered Design
            - Conceptual frameworks of User-Experience
            - Designing IPTV (Internet Protocol Television)
            - Remote Awareness Tools
- Awareness Systems
            - Caretaking situations
            - Cooperative working situations
            - Playful situations
- Designing for Knowledge Workers
            - Academics
            - Biologists
            - Tissue Engineers
            - Product Designers (AMIDA Project)
- Designing for Playful & Social Interaction
            - Panorama Project
            - Organizational Probes
- Design Issues
            - Affordance
            - Aesthetics
            - User-Experience

My PhD

My PhD dissertation will be titled "Designing for Awareness: Physicality, Social Practices & Experience".

In the last 3-4 years, I have carried out research to explore how we can design interactive environments that could convey "awareness" beyond the instrumental and productive needs, within work environments. With the overall aim to design for awareness, my research advocates the ethnomethodologically-informed design approach for conceptualizing and supporting awareness. In this sense, awareness is not a pre-defined phenomenon but something that is situated and particular to a given environment. I have used this ethnomethodologically-informed design approach in two projects for designing interactive systems that support awareness beyond productive aspects in work environments.

1. The first project (AMIDA) deals with mediating awareness within design studio environments. The goal here is to allow designers to be creative and inspire them to collaboratively create new design ideas at an early design stage, in addition to providing an efficient way of collaborating. This is an on-going project and a mobile-tagging based application is under development. Go to the Publications section to have a look at the results from the fieldwork of different design studios.
2. The second project deals with designing an awareness system called Panorama that playfully mediates social awareness for the purpose of community building in a large work organization. The purpose here is not to improve the work efficiencies but to create an environment that makes the co-workers socially aware of each other’s activities in a playful manner.

The following figure describes the approach adapted in my research.

Additionally, my research approach takes into account three important aspects: 1) physicality of the work environments, 2) everyday social practices of co-workers, and 3) co-workers’ overall experience. The issue of physicality denotes the importance of non-verbal, material aspects that play a role in establishing collaboration in work environment. The issues of supporting social practices emphasizes understanding the everyday practices of co-workers in their natural setting and the methods and approaches they apply in going about their work, in order to ensure that new technologies would be easily fitted into their social work environment. Lastly, the issue of experience indicates the importance of subjective aspects, co-workers’ inspirational and creative ways of working and taking into account their activities that go beyond just being productive.

----- Last Updated on the Dec. 2009 -----