While I was unemployed I was allowed to select and follow a free 6 week course – I chose to join a course on project management. In my point of view, understanding project management is a very important part of being an information architect. I believe it is important that the information architect is able to bridge the gap between decision makers, developers and users. I am already experienced in considering and working together with all of these people but I realized that I needed some more practical tools that let me understand how projects are managed, lead and understood in “the real world” – outside university. This is the main reason why I decided to join the course on project management – and of course I also realized that it could not hurt to add this course to my CV

The main thing that interest me about project management is how people collaborate and innovate towards a common goal. The process of establishing and motivating a project group to be innovative is on the other hand not easy. I did however discover that the knowledge I had from my study about creativity and innovation was fitting perfectly with my new knowledge about project management. In this relation I am of course mostly thinking about the creative and innovative semesters that I had at my bachelor in Informatics. At these semesters we  focussed on finding methods that stimulate creativity and innovation. This stimulation is also relevant to my candidate study Information Architecture as the development of web solutions may also benefit from the ability to be innovative.

It is therefore very natural for me to see the project management course as an opportunity to combine my studies in yet another way. When following this course I stumbled upon an article that in some sense have become an eye opener to me. The article is about how Pixar establish their project groups in order to motivate and cultivate innovation in the project group. One of the main suggestions of this article is that the project group should have teammembers with conflicting ideas, as this moves teammembers to the edge of their comfort zone. It is at the edge of our comfort zones that we become effective at being innovative because we all have an urge to find solutions that makes us return to our comfort zone. This made me realize that this was exactly what I had been observing throughout my creative semesters at the Informatics semester.

Another thing that I found interesting in relation to the project management course is projects about change (For more on this topic I suggest reading the book Leading change by John P. Kotter). In the last projects at my candidate study I chose to focus on the topic of Strategy for Change and I realized that this is extremely relevant for an information architect. As an information architect you have to work with development of websites, but in many cases the changes that can be proposed extend beyond the website. When developing Intranets we need to change the employees work flow. In marketing projects the development of a new website needs to be considered in relation to other marketing goals, and the overall business strategy, and in this relation it is also very necessary to understand that the changes that needs to be done to a website may require changes to an overall business strategy.

All in one I found the course to be very interesting and relevant to me. It in some sense helped me to apply a helicopter perspective and understand how to combine some aspects of my education in a way that makes sense when planning and conducting project work in a real life organization – now it’s just time to try it all out in my new job

My new job will be presented in my next blog post… (very soon)

I know that the winter season clock is considered to be “normal time” but the disadvantage in this “time zone” is that the daylight time / bright time is move to an earlier time at the day such that it is more bright in the morning but more dark once we end jobs, or reach spare time in the afternoon. I find it depressing that it is more dark in the afternoon and evening, and I therefore think that it would be more optimal to cancel the concept of daylight saving time and in stead reinstate “summer time” all year around such that we get more light in (spare time) = the afternoon and evening instead of the morning where we cannot really use it…

The main problem in relation to getting the daylight saving time cancelled however seems to be that there are too few people that really care about this issue – it has become a standard thing everyone just do without thinking about what we can do to STOP it. There have been mentioned many reason for why to cancel daylight saving time but I will not recite the all here. As I see it the main problem for now is to make people aware of the issue and take a stance. It is more important that people know their stand point of view in relation to the daylight saving time rather than just ignoring it.

If you are Danish and against the daylight saving time I would recommend joining the organization against daylight saving time (landsforeningen mod sommertid).

What do you think – was this posted in “summertime” or “normal time”/”new time”???
What do you think about daylight saving time?

The most important change in the structure is the addition of a portfolio section in which I have decided to present the work and projects that I have done. This is an attempt to showcase or promote my attained skills (I am after all looking for a new job).

The new template is based on a template called “Creative by Nature” but it has been heavily redesigned both in visuals but I also changed large parts of the PHP used in that template to make it fit my needs. I for instance decided to reuse the idea of blog-post-images from my former template “Magazeen“. Currently I still need to fix some minor things in the template but I decided that it was more important to get the website online now as the most annoying bugs have gone. – I consider the template as a work in progress…

Please feel free to comment on the new design and structure – but you might notice that I haven’t solved an issue related to the use of smiley’s in the comments section below…

The thesis is now handed in and may be downloaded from bit.ly/jonatan_speciale

A few weeks later I went to my last exam at the university to defend my master thesis. The exam went okay – I received the grade 7 and I thereby also got my new title: “Master of Science in Information Technology (information architecture)”. The average grade that I have achieved from my master study is 9,1.

The next step of course is to find a job and I am currently writing my first job application and I plan to roll out more in the comming weeks. I am primarily looking for jobs in Copenhagen and Aarhus as this is where most of the jobs are and because I want to try living in a new city.

Apart from this I just want to mention that I recently bought a Canon Eos 500D camera. I am currently new at using this camera but I am very happy about my results so far! You may see some examples of the pictures that I have taken so far in this picture gallery album. I intend to take much more photos in the time to come and perhaps present much more of the photos I take on the website…

Currently I am using benchmarking to compare the website of Fokus Folkeoplysning with older versions of the website and with other websites in order to see what ideas that can be used when I propose a suggestion and strategy for the future development of the website. Apart from this I need to write about what possibilities that I see for the website and how realizable they are which will be followed by a chapter where I develop the ideas and discuss how the content should be organized at the website before I develop the actual strategy and recommendations. Finally I will of course need to finalize the introduction to the report and write the discussion and conclusion. All in one I do indeed have quite some work to accomplish but I feel that it is possible to finish in a reasonable time and still have time for the final corrections without being overloaded.

Apart from this I am totally looking forward to being able to get at least a little summer holiday – it is frustrating that I have to sit indoor writing my thesis when it is nice weather and most of my friends are having their holiday. Furthermore the fact that it is summer also means that my supervisor is not available as much as much as I have been used to – I actually think it is a bad plan from the university that the master thesis students at the humanistic studies have to use the summer period for their master thesis where it becomes difficult for most students to get supervision in the end of their project where it might be much more important and needed.

Finally I just want to mention that my supervisor “Henrik Schärfe” has caught quite some attention in the media. Aalborg University have decided to start a research on the interaction with robots and in that relation it has been decided that a geminoid robot should be created which is a “visual” copy of my supervisor as illustrated in the post image. The geminoid robot will be able imitate many small movements like for instance those used in facial gestures. It is however still possible to see some difference. The research in Aalborg will focus on how the interaction between man and robot will be and how we will perceive this interaction. I find this research area very interesting and would have loved to be a part of some of it but as I am almost finished at the university and as this is not really related to my study I will just keep it as something that I find interesting For more information about this research I suggest reading the description of the project at: http://c.aau.dk/geminoid.html

Since the last post

When I wrote my last post I was in the process of writing the theory about stakeholder interviews and conducting the actual interviews. I have finished writing the theory and now need to finish the writing about my actual approach and the retrieved findings from the interviews.

In the meantime I have started the work on a brand new chapter about heuristic evaluations. Currently this new chapter is much more finished than the stakeholder chapter.

In order to perform this heuristic evaluation I have decided to involve four potential end users of the website which is in correspondence with the theory by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich that suggest having 3 to 5 evaluators for a heuristic evaluation (I am the fifth evaluator). These four people were all attending courses at both the day and evening school and therefore cover both of the customer audiences that Fokus Folkeoplysning addresses.

Currently I am working on describing the findings from this process of evaluating the website and I must say that these on the first glance seemed quite difficult to interpret. The main discovery during my approach was that the results gained in each session greatly depended on the background of the interviewees. For instance it turned out that some people that are new on using computers blamed their own experience whenever they faced issues while others were better at ignoring these issues. Nevertheless my approach of sitting next to the evaluators made it possible for me to interpret what issues the interviewees discovered even though they blamed themselves.

Even though I initially were quite sceptically about the outcome gained from each evaluation session I actually think that the outcome was quite extensive. It is just a question about getting all the found issues down onto the paper.

In order to achieve as many details from the evaluations I both took notes and recorded the sessions using a digital camera that was pointing at the computer screen. This made it easy for me to reconsider the sessions afterwards and get all the issues written down.

In order to facilitate the process of describing all the usability issues and grouping them I decided to go through each evaluation and write each issue down on a post-it (I used different colors for each interview). Afterwards I went through a short card sorting exercise on my own in order to group the found issues into reasonable groups that I could present in the master thesis.

I have planed that the chapter about heuristic evaluations should be presented before the stakeholder interviews chapter. The next step is therefore to finalize the stakeholder findings and to combine the findings of the stakeholder interviews and heuristic evaluations.

It is my belief that these two evaluations/interviews is a substantial part in the process of conducting the background investigations and in achieving knowledge about the background. Once I feel that the background evaluation is done I will move in the direction of being productive as I will focus much more on finding solutions. The exact process for this phase is not yet planned but I believe that I will find this phase much more interesting and I hope that I will be able to use workshops and card sorting in this process as I find these methods very interesting and motivating as already mentioned in my former post (Workshop about the future of the family).

All considered I am quite positive about the future of my master thesis. I have made a new time schedule that I find realistic – although I must say that I am a little busy.

The post image was taken in february when there were still snow and ice in Denmark.

The programme that we went through during the one day event were divided into four phases:

• critique
• values
• visions
• elaboration

The nice thing about the overall approach is that we started by putting the critiques away so that we could focus on developing the “dream world” situation without being focused on current issues.

During the four phases we used different approaches that all in some way included the creation of cards with ideas, critique and so on that could be used for categorization in a traditional card-sort session style. I would like to point one of the sessions out as I found it extremely interesting:

During this session the cards that each of us had written were just thrown onto a table in a complete mess. We were then asked to organize the cards into sensible groups/categorizations – But we were NOT allowed to say anything to each other. The thing that I find interesting about this way of conducting the card sort is that the final categories actually made sense and that it sort of braked up the social roles that each person usually takes in traditional discussions – Anyone participated and anarchy on decisions loosened the entire process and made it fun to be a part of. – This certainly is an approach to cardsorting that I will remember for future work that I was not aware of.

As a master thesis student of Information Architecture I must admit that the idea of using card sorting and workshops as methods lies very close to my heart. This is something that lies very close to the processes of being creative and create new solutions, categorizations and so on. These methods are good for getting people involved in the process instead of just sitting in the background in a traditional discussion and the methods are able to give interesting and very usable results within an extremely short time frame.

Prior to this workshop I was the one who started up the webpage that the family have, and lets just say that the current website is BORRING – both for members and external visitors. I have therefore started on the process of developing a new “platform” for our website in which I wanted to develop a much more community like system that could involve the members of the family in creating photo albums, family trees, activities and so on (The new “platform” I was developing is based on using the WordPress 3.0 (beta) with multisite support and the Buddypress extension).

Based on my prior considerations and preparations I found it quite interesting that many of the suggestions and considerations about the website was in line with the ones I already had made. In my opinion it turned out that almost all the suggestions would be possible to realize by using the platform that I were establishing. The nice thing in my opinion however is that the work we did on that day made it much more precise to me how the different aspects and structure of the website should be like.

All things considered I think this was a very rewarding workshop. I got inspirations about workshops and card sorting that I can use as an Information Architect. We realized how to develop the family organization in a way that could motivate the members hopefully without too many conflicts. And we realized that we to a much larger extent need to focus on the different groupings and interests that the members of the family have.

I believe the changes we proposed could contribute to a much better fellow feeling in the family if they are presented in a sensible manner to rest of the family.

PS: The post picture is from a small trip to the beach that some of us went for after the workshop. I think it symbolizes that we must be open to changes in the future.

Schedule exceeded

At the current time it is clear to me that I have exceeded my original schedule for my thesis work. This is something that I will certainly need to address  in order to create a new schedule for the rest of the project. The reason why this problem has occured to me is based on a set of reasons including:

• First and foremost I had problems getting the first stakeholder interview arranged because of my contact being busy and because of his holiday. This is of course something that I should have accounted for but now I consider this as lesson for me. I simply need to plan my work in a way where contact with other people within Fokus-Folkeoplysning does not limit my own work.
• Another reason why my schedule have been exceeded is probably something that many thesis students that work on alone encounter – It is difficult to keep working when the deadlines seem to wide and the overall project is so large. It is therefore clear to me that I need when revising my schedule to set up some much more strict deadlines ranging almost from week to week in order to avoid spending time on “nothing”.

Stakeholder interviews and documentation

As already mentioned I have conducted my first stakeholder interview. It was very interesting in the sense that it confirmed some of my ideas but also made me aware of aspects that I had not yet considered. I have based on this initial interview tried to set up two more stakeholder interviews (I am currently waiting for response on this). It is my hope to conduct these during the next week in order to be able to close my work on the initial interviews.

Apart from the actual stakeholder interviews and planning hereof I have also been writing about stakeholder theory for my report. In this part I have primarily been using two great articles (Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success and Setting Up Business Stakeholder Interviews) on the topic from boxesandarrows.com but I have of course also used other sources. I have not currently not finished this section but I have a deadline this upcoming Monday where I have planned a supervisor meeting.

Supervisor meeting and schedule

It is clear to me that I have a lot of work to do and that I therefore need to speed up my work. I have scheduled a supervisor meeting monday and I therefore planed that I need to finish the theory writing on the stakeholder analysis before the meeting. As already described my main problem is that I am behind my original schedule. I have therefore decided that I need to make much more regular and short deadlines to keep my work ongoing. Furthermore it is also important that the new schedule take into account what I do when I have problems in relation to setting up meetings, interviews and so on with people at Fokus Folkeoplysning. It is my plan to create some sort of an idea for a new schedule for the supervisor meeting in order to be able to discuss the future work.

The paper is heavily based on the findings that my project group found during the project named “Bjørnetjeneste”. The project was written within the semester theme innovation and we chose to focus on using fiction in augmented reality.

I would like to present the final paper here but as there may be copyright issues i will refrain from doing this until I am sure whether or not I am allowed to do so. For now however you may read about the project below. When there is more information on this topic I will post a new blog-post to keep you informed…

Bjørnetjeneste: The project

In the project “Bjørnetjeneste” (also presented here) we developed an interactive story that could be experienced in the city of Aalborg. The interesting part is that we developed a story that forced the user of the system to make ethical decisions while still trying to save the life of his own alter ego.

The user acts as a postman and is actually physically equiped with a postman jacket and other typical postman objects. Throughout the story the user is asked to make ethical decisions on how to interact with the surroundings in the story and has the impression that all of this changes the fate of the postman. This is however not true.

All the decisions that the postman (user) makes will in some way end up being bad. For instance in one scene the postman is asked to follow an old lady across the street. If he chooses to do this she will die in shock of a satellite dish that falls to the ground in front of them, and if he chooses not to help the old lade he will get bad responses from his surroundings, and in his “newspaper from the future” be able to read that the old lady was killed by a bus when she was to cross the street.

All the bad results from the choices that the postman (user) makes in the story builds builds up for the main event that the postman is killed from a fall from the big “hotel hvide hus”.

A more complete description of the story may be read in the final paper once published or in the report that we made. (The report is not available online but it may become available online in the future) – I will post updates if that is the case.

Furthermore it is my intention to have some initial interviews view key persons within the organization to get an overview before starting the “core” research phase. In that relation I have chosen to focus on “stakeholder interviews” which is made for this specific goal of interviewing key persons. I am therefore reading theories on this topic and trying on my own to define the goals of these interviews and the questions that I want to get answered. If all goes well I hope to accomplish at least some of these interviews during the next week (in this week a lot people are on vacation).

So all in one my current status is that I am reading a lot materials and planning for the next week interviews.