Computational Culture, a software studies' journal

Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of interdisciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational objects, practices, processes and structures.

I enjoyed brushing up on my production skills in HTML / CSS and XML, while designing and producing this on-line journal in Wordpress. It is an exciting aspect of social media publishing platforms to open publication opportunities in more flexible, yet easy accessible and distributable ways then traditional media, while addressing institutional requirements for publication.

Journal publications

I have published a few ideas in professional journals.

The article in the Journal of IA deals with moving away from prediction in user-interaction behaviour and argues for a more flexible view in terms of probabilities depending on the context of interaction. (see article)

The article in the BCS Interface magazine (issue 81) deals with the creative potential of user interaction in exploratory informational interaction.

Activity theory, Personas & Agile at PLC

A large part of my work for PLC (Practical Law Company, a legal publishing house) consisted in exploring, researching and documenting how a very specific user group (i.e. lawyers) interacts with internet based products.

In this process I complemented a few standard research methods, such as demographic personas, with a more activity based approach, which also contained high level flow charts. These high level user descriptions in turn can support a variety of scenario descriptions, user requirement documents, and also help to integrate UCD methods in the context of agile development.

PLC covers a number of  different law disciplines, such as financial, tax, commercial, property, aimed at different supporting lawyers as well as senior staff and partners. The user group of “laywers” is, therefore, a very wide matrix. As part of this work, it was crucial to understand that lawyers working in different fields work in very different ways. PLC produces digests from the latest legal publications, helping busy lawyers update themselves on the latest situations with speed and ease.

This sounds like a functional, rational, highly structured field, where functionality is key. In fact, this was very affective-specific work – lawyers are a highly individual user group. They have to get their facts right, or they can be sued (both privately and as a firm). Winning a case depends on them having the correct up-to-date knowledge.

Having confidence in a digest, such as those produced by the PLC, means an enormous amount of trust and previous research: lawyers double-check PLC’s publications to ensure that they are trustworthy.

Imagine a lawyer going about his work: jumping into a cab, reading PLC information on a Blackberry, and then heading straight into a court-room. We named this key emotional branding moment: the PLC moment. This is the moment when a lawyer trusts the publication material implicitly. This ties in with my research thesis that structural, functional and unstructured, emotional interaction are highly intertwined – and this has never been truer than at PLC.

Position: Senior UXA
Year: 2009 / 2010

Utag.it - time- and intensity-based tagging of videos

I am part of the Goldsmith Leverhulme Media Research centre for the project 'UtagIt'. I developed conceptual and functional aspect of the interface for this project. Utag.it is a platform that allows time- and intensity-based tagging of videos and is developed jointly with  the Tate research department on time based culture mining.

Year: 2009

PhD Publication 'Revisiting intuitive interaction - steps towards an integral view of interaction'

My PhD was undertaken in the department of cultural studies; my supervisor Dr Matthew Fuller is very interested in critical software studies.

My thesis deals with a critical discussion of rationally based HCI and interaction approaches, and suggests a more integrated approach. It also explored issues of sub conscious perception, cognitive and enactive perception. The practice based part explores innovative qualitative research and design methods in the context of experimental interaction scenarios.

My supervisor choose the ideal examiners for this kind of work, resulting in an animated and very constructive viva. I am very grateful for all the support and advice I have received.It helped me to gain a new perspective on my subject area, expand my research techniques, and introduced me to very innovative thinkers and writers in the areas of HCI / interaction and techno-culture.


Year: 2008