About Me, My Masters and This Past Acedemic Year

After completing my bachelor’s degree, I gained three years of work experience in thesoftware field. While working, I started to feel that I was not done learning and the idea to start a master programme came to mind. Then the big search began: which masters would I pick?

Eventually, I chose the master Human-Computer Interaction because it piqued my interest in the topics of design & technology. Often in my work as a software developer when I was making a feature for users I was wondering 'why am I making a system that works this way? Wouldn't it be better if x or y?' and I believe this masters can prepare me to finally answer that question in a scientific way.

Looking at the electives in the study programme that I compiled for myself, I think I can say that some align more with the topics within HCI than others. I followed Sound and Music Technology and Natural Language Processing in the second and fourth period respectively. SMT offered an in-depth insight into importance of music and sounds, a lot of processing methods and even opportunities for generation of music through AI. I thought the contents of this course were facinating and I even used quite some knowledge I gained from this course in my Interactive Technology Innovation project. That said, in my opinion, while sound and music can be very inttegral to a user experience and can certainly offer a bridge between technology and humans, in and of itsself did not touch upon human computer interaction.

I believe the same can be said for natural language processing. This course teaches old and also brand new methods of generating, classifying and parsing texts using computers. While interesting, I would in the future opt for choosing a different course; this course was too theoretical, mathmatical and distant from HCI in retrospect.

I believe MMI was one of the most interesting and relevant courses I followed this year. It heavily touched upon the topics of human perception, technological modalities and the interaction between humans and this technology. As a project we conducted an entire study on 20 participants. We created the Liquid Glove, a glove with a microcontroller and peltier elements attached, that could get hot or cold on input. In addition, we created a simple virtual world that could be viewed by using a virtual reality headset. With this, we conducted a research into immersion into virtual worlds. I loved how much freedom was given to us in creating a research for ourselves, and in the end it was a lot of fun as well because you are essentially demonstrating a unique experience.

Lastly, I folowed the technologies for learning course, given in the first period. This course was all about learning systems and tracking student learning process, using a lot of real-life examples. I think it was very relevant for HCI, but also incredibly specific of a field. We created a (prototype of a) learning system that could teach chess: from the names of the pieces to actual strategies. As someone who knows absolutely nothing about chess, it was really interesting to build such a system. There is a LOT of considerations for a system, and actually trying to create one really helped understand the contents of the course better.