Steinar Kristoffersen



sk at hiof dot no
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So, back to blogging. Not that I expect people to read. Or care. But as a reminder to myself:
I think a new course could be designed, called iHCI, covering a new aread of intuitive as well as informatics-based interaction design. The balance should be overturned, compared to what it is today, where we build "hard" systems using coommonsense, and "soft" methods. The aim ought to be to re-vitalize the conceptualization of systems we want to build, and, use "hard" methods to get it right.

discuss : so far. [/iHCI] permanent link

We are looking for PhD students.

The project "The universal device" have funding for at least two people, to do research in HCI and new interface techniques. There is going to be a large aspect of it concering integration as well.

My current focus in the project is to explicate the research agenda accociated with integration.

I will post a translation of the job advert really soon. Please email me if you are interested.

discuss : so far. [/thud] permanent link

I have to admit I find similar kinds of problems in HCI as I do in IS. The
ideological dimension is string, and people moreover launch "paradigms" for it based on what they are interested in themselves, rather than what has a proven value for the design and development of a better user experience.

HCI tends to be less extreme than IS, with CSCW somewhere in the middle, when it hence comes to producing research results that are completely unconnected with what vendors, programmers, users and even our own students find remotely interesting or relevant. Except those student who wish to get a PhD later, of course.

This does not mean that papers like Harrison et al.'s "The three paradigms of HCI" is not useful, however, e.g., in teaching. It provides a clear, albeit predictable and recognizable "third path".

All discisplines seem always to be in a dialectical state of thesis-antithesis, thus warranting a synthesis. It hardly produces insight that we can use to design novel applications, but it is pedagogical enough.

The problem is that this way of thinking is not itself part of the "third path".

discuss : so far. [/hci] permanent link

So, the starting place, for me at least, seem to be that there is a problem
with the way that the "IT" as developed, as a discipline. It seems downright unscientific. But this is of course not a very specific complaint.

Just a place to start.

What is it, then, that we ought to be looking for? Something sharper, more precise, something which can be refined systematically.

What are we going to use it for? Understand the domain, i.e., the user settings and requirements, build better systems.

I intent to come up with a proposal for this. There will be a need to explore and criticize existing IS/IT/HCI-research, and I shall do so really briefly first, then launch some ideas of my own, before going back to dissecting other peopl's work in more detail. This blog is a diary, a sketchbook, a lab.

The shortest possible critique, based on discussion that I have had with people at the IS groups in Oslo, Gothenburg and a few other places, is that there is usually an ideological agnenda for IS research. This agenda determines what the research is going to find, at least in terms of the type of findings, but also the "correct" method (and thus a theoretical bias) for the research. This means that what would elsewhere be the most interesting products of research, namely the theories, are generally pre-determined by politics, "guru-love" (which I shall explain later) and personal capacities.

The next big objection that I have towards this way of doing research, is that there is a mix-up of the objectives and the finidings/conclusions. By this I mean that the research is usually very process-oriented, looking for "better" ways of doing things. This "better" is usually not defined, and if it is, it is not measured. One is therefore very likely to end up with the conclusion that the preferred approach is, indeed, "better", which may be all fine and good, except that it is not a very surprising result. How many PhD dissertations need to conclude that user participation in projects is a good thing, nor that a "bottum up" approach is best, or that flexibility is a worth-while target for IS; at least one that sounds better that "rigidity".

There are many ways that this is not a satisfying state of affairs, and certainly one is that it takes research away from computing, from actual use or development of information systems, away from relevance, and hence, funding, studentes, impact!

discuss : so far. [/case] permanent link

There seems to be a serious and deep schizonphrenia ranging in "our"
discipline. It is exactly this, that it would be unclear what is denoted by "our discipline". Both terms are problematic. It is not *ours* since Information Systems (IS), digital design (whatever that is) and HCI, including UX, Ubicomp, CSCW, work with the same basic phenomena from completely different angles. Nor is it very clear how it constitutes a *discipline*, since most of it is trivial, uninspired and blunt. We love to rip off theories from other subject disciplines, such as philosophy and sociology, but prefer not to read it properly. When it is applied for something rather than showing off, the results are pretty much unsurprising if you know the ideology of the persons involved in the research. What is the point?

discuss : so far. [] permanent link

We have many small schools and universities in Norway. They are to a
large extent localized according to regional politics. Or perhaps more precisely, any re-localization debate is mainly driven by regional rather than national concerns. For a great deal of communities, they are perhaps the most important symbol of an alternative source of activity, income and taxes,compared to the existing corner-stone industry (which could be everything from paper mills to military activity to county administration). The problem is of course that growth is, in the best case, exhausted for the traditional "industries" and they may even be under long-lasting pressure from globalization or a new defensive strategy, or simply common sense. The university colleges, lumped together with various "innovation parks" seems to be the standard package to demonstrate that there is a political willingness to survive in the longer run.

The challenge to this idea right now is, paradoxically, centralization. There are many reasons for it, I guess, but I have (in consulting) experienced Norway as a "local branch" country. There is little production of goods and services around in the country, most of it happens abroad. Marketing and middle-level administration takes place here, but with headquarters in Lausanne and factories in China, companies find it easier I guess to be around the centers, which have international airports (hardly even Gardermoen qualifies,..., unless Copenhagen or Amsterdam are the only places you really need to go), and the people that one needs to work with near by. If everybody wants everybody else closer,..., you have a big(ger) city.

Standardization is a factor as well. Lausanne develops software and Oslo has to use it. The department of finance decides to use SAP, and bureaucratic logic dictates that it is therefore better that everybody else associated with public administration use it as well. Even if it is rubbish for whatever they need to use it for. Anyway. Centralization becomes fashionable as well. Young people want to live in a red-brick penthouse flat, and if it cannot be in "the City" as such, Oslo will have to do,...

The result is now that local colleges are loosing ground. They are getting fewer students. In a lot of places, they have been getting much too few students, and entire faculties are being shut down. The bureaucratic gut-reacting comes into play, of course, and imitating industry (or rather financial) patterns form the nineties, they rally to merger smaller institutions into bigger ones. Bigger is better.

There is a striking difference, however. The raw "material" that we work with as input as well as means of production in education and research are human beings. They are not timber, gravel, iron. They are people. How hard can it be to see the difference? They would like to decide for themselves where to live, for instance?

Neither the students nor the faculty can be shifted around according to some logic of production level efficiency. Thus, institutions cannot, via mergers, be made "bigger". They district colleges are (in terms of capacity) arbitrarily big already, they just do not currently have the number of students that they want. Thus, mergers mean specialization.

Specialization is one way of moving students around the country to places where they would not for other reasons go. You would still have to persuade staff that they should either move themselves, though, or switch to working with something else, unless you have the luxury of being able to wait until the next generation of faculty have been educated within the school's local specialties. This takes patience, but also the ability to predict what is going to be useful orientations in 20 years' time.

There is still a big chance that students' interest have not developed sufficiently, though, before they undertake their first year. In many cases, their interests are probably going to be developed throughout the first coupe of weeks at university, when they meet other students that become their role models, and then it matures over a period of many years until they are, eventually, ready to do a PhD or maybe at their Master's. And this is when they are going to be able to make the decision to move somewhere else to get an in-depth research degree.

It seems, therefore, to be possible to conclude that specialization and collaboration based on it is a good idea, then, but not until the student's interest have developed enough for them to choose, eventually, to re-locate based on these interest and ambitions. If they are aware of a research group being the best in the world, they are probably going to consider moving there, wherever it is. The same type of mechanisms is likely to apply to the professors as well. They are probably going to be more willing to move to wherever, if they can be given a chance to work with the best people in the world. The big capacity educational institutions might better be located in the big cities, since students are likely to follow the centralization trend that way anyway. When they get the ambitions that have the necessary depth and direction, they may move back out again to find exactly the right group of people and equipment that they need for their research. The research universities can thus be situated anywhere. Capacity education should be centralized.

The current habit of thinking in Norway, I suspect, has been the opposite and the result is that researchers at the big universities keep complaining about the excessive teaching load and that teachers are the small colleges do not have enough students. Is that really so strange?

My argument does not mean that collaborative efforts are a waste of time, but obviously it does become more complicated. If a college wants to become a graduate school with an international reputation, which would be necessary to get sufficient drive for national students to move there, as well as attracting research students and faculty from abroad, your friends are also the competition. On the other hand, there is only so much to be gained from working with institutes which do not overlap, or are weaker, in terms of research performance. Not a philosophy easily embraced in Scandinavia, I am afraid,...

discuss : so far. [] permanent link

Having read in Aftenposten today that Norwegian academics struggle to find
jobs after they have finished their PhDs got me going again about writing. They (meekly) have not managed to get an electronic version out, but at least their lobbyists have one at Lausungene.

Anyway, the complaint that only two-thirds of the PhDs get a job at the University after they graduate must be looked at critically. It may be a problem for recruiting good people to do research, of course, since most clever people would not without some consideration of other factors, take a poorly paid and demanding "trainee" position for 3-5 years, only to be told after that period that they have to line up back wherei they were initially.

On the other hand, the argument that they should all get good research jobs straight away would seem to imply that they are actualy qualified for it straight away as well. I do not think that they are. The local university may have other needs, in terms of subject areas and skills. This is less likely though, although some supervisors and groups let their students do whatever they want, students tend to submit work that fits with their departments. However, not having worked or done research elsewhere is seriously a weakness on anybody's cv, and especailly in research. So, PhDs need to go somewhere else to work, preferrably abroad, in order to qualify for jobs locally.

Another even bigger problem, which was not mentioned in Aftenposten, was that the majority of pemanent position are not given as the result of an open process, where an international commuity of qualified PhDs were given the chance to apply. Instead, the ads are camouflaged, tailored or not posted, to "trim" the applications that end up on the dean's table. This is one way of actually making almost sure that only one hand-picked (usually the local one) candidate qualified in the end. One even safer approach is to let the local candidate take short-term sub positions or temp jobs for more than four years. In Norway, one is then legally entitled to a permanent post.

What is the consequence of this, then, in terms of quality of research, teaching, supervising and international mobility? Pretty easy to see, in my opinion, and a mechanisms that favours "Lausungene" in the short term, but is a disaster to funding, salaries and status in the long term.

discuss : so far. [] permanent link