Vote for Research

Hey all you clever people out there. I would like to ask you a simple but important question – to me, at least.

I think I might be at a decision point in my research career. As I have re-started doing interaction design research after a short trip into full-time design consulting, I am now faced with the important decision of what to focus my research towards. So in order to draw on our collective intelligence I am putting this question up for a popular vote right here on the site. (I don’t know how to do a radio-button vote, so please give your thoughts in the comments at the end of the post, thx)

I have several issues I am interested in. Some are overlapping and some are so far out of main-stream research that pursuing them would mean an actual risk of being burned at the collegial stake. But here’s he list as it appear right now from the top of my head. Add issues you feel are more important.

1. Social interaction with an evolutionary perspective: This means continuing my focus from the PhD dissertation. Adding the evolutionary perspective would be the new, provocative thing where I would direct my design experiments to focus on interaction platforms and experiences that would evolve the user (Uh, can I even say that?) and explore the idea of social fields, somehow.
2. Design thinking: also something I picked up and elaborated on in the dissertation. My work there has been fairly well received and it could be interesting to move further down that line. Design thinking is right now described as introducing a notion of aesthetic inquiry into scientific studies as well as other innovation processes, I guess. It is both a discussion within a philosophy-of-science context as well as a meta-reflection on the process of design. A bit heavy theoretical focus, but it might work as a focus I could work with on the side of another experimental research, like the one mentioned above.
3. The third option is to refocus completely away from my previous research-through-design work, which means building stuff, see what happens and use that as outset for making theory (science, maybe even).
   I have thought about starting to work more with the process of design and doing research into making new ways creating ideas, of collaborating, of exploring etc. This is then what I call research-in-design as opposed to research-through-design (the researcher designs stuff himself) or research-on-design (the researcher looks at the product of design in, say, historical or ergonomic analysis).
   I would explore innovation and design processes in ways inspired by the work of C. Otto Scharmer of MIT. I’d like to add to that field, but have no vision right now of how that could happen.
4. Except that I could do a project and call it “the creative potential of immersion and contemplation”.
   I have for some years now been very interested in and dedicated to a meditative practice and can see how this has value. In a project like this it might be interesting to explore what Ken Wilber calls the relationship between first-person and third-person perspectives, and then focus in on the design – the process of creating the new.
   One major drawback of a project such as this is that it is starting to move closer to the fire, so to speak. The work of Wilber, although solid as far as I can tell, is not really recognized as valid foundational philosophy for research. Which incidentally also makes it intriguingly dangerous to pursue.
   By the way, focusing more on process than product would also mean that I had a strong competence even after all this computer/technology hype has blown over :-)
5. As we move closer to the hot first-row seats at the stake, I also have a big interest in how the body relates to all these technologies. Actually the interest is in how the body relates. Period. I’d love to call a project “Wisdom of the Shaman” and explore how the ancient, spiritual ways of knowing and relating could be explored in relation to the technologies we create and how we make it interface to us. Yes, gentlemen – light up your torches.
   But actually at Interactive Spaces we have been working with kinesthetic interaction for some time now, and developed interfaces for learning that uses the potential of the body and movement. So there might be a relevant new corridor of exploration. But the S-word (spiritual) would probably create an insane level of resistance in the research field.

I am all out of ideas from the top of my head for now. New ones might pop up, and then I should probably add more to here.

AND I would love to hear your comments and collect your votes for what the next big thing is going to be.