Topi Koskinen

1
Topi Koskinen

• UCIT presentation
• 16.1.2002

2
My Background Education

• My educational background is in social sciences,
  I have graduated at 1999 from the Department of
  Sociology and Social Psychology with Sociology as
  my main subject.
• The title of my Masters Thesis was A Tool for a
  task A sociological study on new communication
  technologies dealing with the social
  construction of emerging communication
  technologies and their application in everyday
  contexts.
• This phenomenon I continued studying in my later
  work at Nokia Mobile Phones, of which I have
  written two refereed academic publications.

3
My Background Professional career

• I have worked at Nokia Mobile Phones in several
  positions related to human-computer interaction,
  usability, and user-centered design.
• I started this work at 1997 as trainee usability
  engineer, and have continued after my graduation
  as usability specialist and later on as research
  project manager.
• The tasks have included end-user needs research,
  user-centered user interface design, and
  usability enginering in application and product
  development, and especially during the last two
  years, for and with technology programs such as
  GPRS.

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My interest _at_ UCIT

• My major interest is thus in the by no means
  closely related subjects
• The social construction and everyday perception
  of the consumer application on one hand, and hard
  wireless technologies such as GPRS, WCDMA, SIP,
  or WLAN on the other.
• It is in the usability and application of
  technologies beyond the visible user interface.
• It is in the human-machine interaction, where the
  machine is a technology that shall not be visible
  to the end-user at all, although it will for sure
  affect to the total user experience of the
  products they are implemented to.

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The Naive approach
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The questions of interest

• How are these technologies brought into the
  everyday contexts of the man-on-the-street? How
  does s/he understand and adapt to these
  technologies? What are the different discourses
  constructed around the technologies throughout
  the phases from early technological ideas to
  market entry to market exit?
• The usage concepts of such technologies How to
  show or hide such technologies in the user
  interfaces of mobile communication appliances?
  What is the correlation and interaction between
  the concept of the technologies as they are
  presented in the user interfaces and the
  discourses in the public discussion? Can the
  overall perception and discursive concept of the
  technologies be affected by conscious solutions
  in the user interaction design?
• How to apply user-centric design principles -
  such as the ones presented by ISO standardization
  organization to technologies that should be as
  invisible and transparent as possible to
  technologies rather than applications?