Hereby I declare this blog as offi­cially OPENED!

I am myself curi­ous where it will lead me — my moti­va­tion is to share my thoughts, dis­cov­er­ies and exper­i­ments I will do while work­ing on my Master’s the­sis in Inter­face Design at FH Pots­dam with you. But occa­sion­ally, I might also just post related infor­ma­tion or reviews of things I dis­cover. Shar­ing is caring!

Over the last year, I have been work­ing on a lot of dif­fer­ent stuff on a pretty broad basis and now it’s time to cristal­lize out a the key issue I want to deal with. If some­one asks me right now what I am work­ing on, I just say “feeds and tags”. Which is true to some degree but of course a bit shortened.

Maybe some back­ground first: My gen­eral approach to Inter­face Design is to study how sta­tis­tics and machine learn­ing approaches (such as clus­ter­ing and neural net­works) and visu­al­iza­tion can be com­bined to cre­ate novel inter­faces for per­sonal infor­ma­tion man­age­ment. Con­cep­tu­ally, I think both the desk­top metaphor as well as the page-based brow­ing approach found in the web do not really suit the com­plex inter­ac­tions between dig­i­tal data we deal with on a daily basis. So I think a lot in terms of a multi-dimensional, inter­con­nected snip­pet sys­tems to store, retrieve and com­mu­ni­cate infor­ma­tion. Actu­ally, you could say I work on user inter­face visions for the seman­tic web.

So cur­rently, I research a lot about tag­ging sys­tems. To put it short, tags are just free-form key­words you asso­ciate with data. In a way, this is the weak­est, but there­fore also least restric­tive infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture you could use. I believe tags have the poten­tial to rev­o­lu­tion­ize our way of deal­ing with every­day data: they allow asso­cia­tive, multi-dimensional and bottom-up organ­i­sa­tion of data — a great alter­na­tive to folder struc­tures. That is, if we pro­vide the right tools to work with them in a fluid man­ner. This has been one part of my research and I will post some more insights an exper­i­ments about that soon.

Sec­ond, I am try­ing to find out what role webfeeds (deliv­ered via RSS or other for­mats) will play in the future. They pro­vide a way to sub­scribe to infor­ma­tion on the web and con­sume it in a spe­cial reader, your email client, web browser or portable devices. Like a news­pa­per sub­scrip­tion, they can help you keep track of stuff you do not want to actu­ally search for every day. A very promis­ing tech­nol­ogy, which is cur­rently, how­ever, only used inten­sively by a small geek elite. Again, poten­tially an inter­face design problem.

Other impor­tant top­ics have been con­text, time and infor­ma­tion shar­ing. You see it’s get­ting broad already.

So to put it short: in the end, I might design a novel kind of news­reader demon­strat­ing my inter­face ideas for these new tech­nolo­gies and con­cepts. I’ll keep you posted.