1st International workshop on
Industrial User Experience
Kari Rönkkö and Jeff Winter from the research group GSIL did arrange the 1st International workshop on Industrial User Experience, WIndUx 2011, together with Mikko Rissanen ABB Corporate Research from Västerås Sweden and Sanjay Tripathi from Bangalore India, at the HCI India conference in Bangalore April 2011.
The workshop is planned to be a yearly event placed on different international conferences. WIndUx is about the manifold challenges of working with User eXperience (UX) in industrial environments. The goal of the workshop was to provide a forum for discussing problems and possibilities when working with UX in industrial, and often automated setting. Also to provide suggestions for new ways of working in the field based on the knowledge and practical experience of the workshop participants.
Kari Rönkkö was also keynote speaker in plenary session on the HCI India conference in Bangalore April 2011. The theme for the conference was "This is the Time", which recognizes the visible footprints left in past and looking forward to connect us together at the right time and at the right place to address wider aspects of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and usability research.
Rönkkö provided his view on the conference theme, emphasizing wicked problems in design, and how science including human actors in design work and software development lacks the necessary stability that is prerequisite in traditional positivistic research, such as in physics that is building on the laws of nature. As humans do not obey to the laws of nature, and other replacing stability providing repeatability is lacking - we need to recognize and take advantage of the fact that what is good science or not is a political product made up in different scientific communities with common interests.
During the visit in India April 2011 Kari Rönkkö also visited ABB Corporate Research in Bangalore, and hold a presentation for the management and employees there. Rönkkö provided explanation of which indexical dimensions of reference are necessary for humans when investigating, interpreting, and understanding their own nearby environment, and also to understand and communicate with other humans. An model of how interpretation, interaction, and reality construction take place was presented, and thereafter applied to explain why cooperation in software development is so challenging. Thereafter Kari Rönkkö together with Mikko Rissanen, who is the main responsible for Usability research in Sweden and India within ABB Corporate Research, presented the results from the WIndUx workshop, and discussed what implications it might have for ABB.
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