Doctoral School

CASS Mobile query application

Karthikeya Acharya — Sun, 23 May 2010 21:49:18 +0000

http://www.kp-lab.org/tools/cass-tool

FISCAR

Karthikeya Acharya — Sun, 23 May 2010 21:46:57 +0000

FISCAR Conference happening here!

http://neumann.uiah.fi/fiscar2010

PROTOTYPE – Putting Customers in Charge of Design

Karthikeya Acharya — Sun, 16 May 2010 19:43:41 +0000

From NYTimes, User in-charge of design in China.

http://alturl.com/vqf7

Use of data over voice

Karthikeya Acharya — Fri, 14 May 2010 13:41:23 +0000

From NY times:

http://alturl.com/85hg

The green metropolis

Karthikeya Acharya — Wed, 12 May 2010 18:41:02 +0000

This article as a critique comes across as timely, when criticism is being heaped on ‘urban’ living. At this juncture when most of our amenities are dependent on fossil fuel based energy systems, it is but pertinent that our values get questioned, which are in turn dependent on systems which provide them.

http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=13368

The doer’s club

Karthikeya Acharya — Sun, 09 May 2010 23:14:11 +0000

From the design observer’s group:

http://tinyurl.com/kn6dxy

Manuscript seminar: Building good arguments

Salu Ylirisku — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:35:49 +0000

In his seminar presentation Salu Ylirisku made a point about creating good arguments. The presentation was based on the specific (perhaps it might be called ‘concept generating’) approach that he is following. The slides can be downloaded here [PDF, 2,5 M].

A Few Web Tools for Research

Tatu Marttila — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:35:51 +0000

There are some web based tools that might be quite valuable for handling the research process and material. Here I’ll list some that I’ve found. Please comment and tell us about the tools that you’ve found from the web, or have found especially helpful in your research process.

- Xmarks (www.xmarks.com) is a tool that helps you keep your bookmarks in order on several computers, browser programs and platforms. This is done by installing the program (for Firefox, Safari and so on) and then saving your bookmarks in the Xmarks site and syncing them always when a browser opens up (automatically).

- Zotero (www.zotero.org) is a really powerful tool (only Firefox) to save and organize material from the web (with all the reference information) by clicking only a button. You can organize your material, index text, create notes and so on, and even save the material online (or at least some of it) to be accessible even on a public computer (i.e. in library). Very handy – check the introductive video on the page…

- Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) is a great service that allows you to have 2 GB of online storage, which can be shared (and is synced) between multiple computers. No more memory sticks (or less at least). Only a webmail address needed to start the service.

- Wordle (www.wordle.net) is more like a toy, in which one can copy paste text or an web site URL, and get a nice “word cloud”. But it seems like quite useful toy.

Please add your favorite web tools and comments about them after this post.

Pics from Winter School 2010

Jung-Joo Lee — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:33:43 +0000

Manuscript seminar: On personal voice by Petra Ahde

Tjhien Liao — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:24:36 +0000

Initial questions to the topic are:
1. How to project your personal voice and the personal voice of your data (e.g. people you interviewed) through out your manuscript?
2. How to retain your personal voice or the personalities that your data represents?
3. How to balance these voices and how to deal with the big emotions in your interview data?
4. How to address the people, test subjects in your research? These question arose when done a research using probes?

Sometimes your data is so rich on emotions and stories that you can easily produce both a scientific manuscript and a novel type book. Publications are not often in published in the personal form. Dissertations however, can contain more personal forms. Different disciplines advocate different voices. It may become a problem if your opponent is from a different discipline. However this has not yet experienced in practice at TaiK. Also in a design related degree playfulness in language could even be encouraged.

When quoting real life stories 5 sentences is good practice. Usually the personal form is more used in the dissertation. Publications however, are often more written in objective form. There are different graphic strategies to approach quotation in your manuscript. Color, font, size, italic, etc. Explain why you use these quotations as exemplar.

Inside reader: Whom are you addressing in your dissertation. This will most likely be those people that are closely related to your references and your resources.

It is important not to forget to mention the researcher’s background. For in this case the researcher is female herself, a jeweler herself and Finnish of background. These belong to the pre-conditions of the research. Important: don’t fall in love with your text and dont fall in love with your data. (Emotional stories)