researcher, teacher and a curious person...
keywords: human computer interaction, playful interfaces, serious games, scientific creativity, scientific images, data repositories
My phD thesis, "Connecting the dots: Playful interactions with scientific image data in repositories" investigates playfulness as a relevant attribute of a scientist's interaction with scientific images.
If scientific practice can benefit from a moment of openness, playfulness and exploration, what kind of interfaces can we provide to support playful engagement with scientific images? What could play and playfulness with scientific images amount to and how do we design for it?
My phD dissertation starts with a review on scientific creativity, the role of images in the life sciences, discovery and exploration in data collections and the meeting points of play and games with HCI. Based on this material, I proposed (a) playfulness as a relevant attribute of interfaces to scientific image collections and (b) associations as the focus point of play for the sake of creative responses to images. In the course of my phD research, I produced two games motivated by the notion of associations: Onto-Frogger, an arcade style game to communicate explicit associations, and LABBOOK, a collaborative storytelling game to elicit (implicit) associations.