Research
I research how interfaces, and the artificial intelligence embedded in them, help people understand, decide and act. The question is not new: I brought it with me from studying physical objects, where it began.
My interest in design began long before I worked with screens. My undergraduate dissertation started with everyday objects from East and West Germany; the more I researched their materials, forms and uses, the more I needed to understand the people and context that had produced them.
I now bring some of those questions to digital products. I want to study what a person understands when using an interface and how their decisions change when it incorporates AI. This is open research: the historical work exists, but the new hypotheses need their own experimental design and testing.
The question
How do a person’s understanding, trust and decisions change when an interface incorporates qualities we associate with physical objects?
The starting point · East and West Germany, 1949–1989
The work began by comparing designed objects from East and West Germany between 1949 and 1989. Two political systems producing utensils for the same hands, with different resources and different priorities about what an object should do.
In comparing them, I looked beyond aesthetics to their materials, how they were used and what they revealed about daily life. I found no rule equating scarcity with materiality or abundance with its disappearance. These are observations about specific objects and documents that need to be read in context.
That raises a question I want to keep exploring: what happens to this sensory relationship when we move from an object to a digital interface? This is an open line of inquiry, not a historical continuity established by my dissertation. These four examples, ordered by the dates of the objects or advertisements analysed, help explain my starting point.
Open research directions
01
I want to trace the relationship between the haptic and the optical, from twentieth-century material culture to contemporary interfaces. I ask what changes when a gesture loses texture or an interaction moves to voice, without assuming its effects have been demonstrated.
02
Applied, measurable HCI: how an interface with embedded AI changes what a person understands, trusts and ultimately does. This direction requires prototypes, participants and metrics; its experimental design has yet to be developed.
03
I want to study how tokens, components and composition rules can guide interface generation without losing coherence or human control. I use the CMS under development as a laboratory to explore interface stability, adaptation and editing. This is ongoing work: it is not yet scientific validation or a commercial product.
I want research and practice to support each other: building prototypes to test my questions and using what I learn to design better. Without confusing something working in one project with proof that it works for everyone.
How I work
I am also interested in researching through what I build: asking a question, creating a prototype and examining what it allows me to learn. I want to document what I decide, what I reject and why. Research through design, distinguished by Christopher Frayling in Research in Art and Design (1993/94), is a reference for developing this direction, not a validation of projects I have already completed.
Human-centred design according to ISO 9241-210 and the Double Diamond structure my applied work: framing, research, system, prototype, development and validation, with appropriate evidence at each stage.
And one rule I set myself: always distinguish what has been measured from what has been inferred. Presenting an estimate as a fact is the costliest mistake a researcher can make.
During my UX/UI master’s studies, I trained in qualitative and quantitative research techniques. What matters to me is choosing them to suit the question and the stage of the project. Personas, for example, help me synthesise needs and behaviours from research; they do not replace data and are not a data-collection technique.
In a group assignment during my master’s studies, I took part in an open card sort for an academic Cecotec app proposal. We documented groupings, a similarity matrix and a dendrogram to guide the categories. I distinguish this from a professional commission or an improvement validated in production. Knowing the other techniques does not mean I have used them in every project either.
Continue exploring
You can find my developing ideas in the journal, and see how they inform products in the projects.