Home 2015

Seminar of spring 2006

Recent updates

8.8.2009 Current PM&RG seminar and PM&RG education main page
23.5.2006 Final event is held Tue 23.5.2006 15.50. See the invitation for more information. Welcome!
25.1.2006 The dates of two lectures (Ilpo Koskinen and Sari Kujala) were swapt. Title for Päivi Timonen's lecture was added. See timetable page.
24.1.2006 Introduction to innovation prototyping and SSUR model slides added to the timetable page.
18.1.2006 Opening lecture slides added to the timetable page.
13.01.2006 Assignment and presentations pages added.
13.01.2006 Lecturer of Sari Kujala confirmed, however, the date is still likely be swapped with another lecture ( timetable). Reference to the related article added to the reference page.
11.01.2006 Lecture of Päivi Timonen confirmed ( timetable). Notice that the titles of the lectures are tentative and will be refined.
09.01.2006 Lectures of Ilpo Koskinen and Jukka Vanhala confirmed ( timetable)
05.01.2006 literature survey , topic application and references pages added.
19.12.2005 Draft of the seminar home page published.

Time and place

The seminar sessions are held on Tuesday at 16.15-19.00 in the lecture hall T4 of the CS building of Helsinki University of Technology. The topics and presentation material are collected in the timetable that also indicates possible exeptions to the time and place.

The first lecture is 17.1.2006 at 16.15 in the CS building, lecture hall T4.

Registration

Please register as soon as possible, but at latest 17.1. 16.00. Check the registration instructions.

Topic of the seminar

Keywords: domestic appliances, consumer electronics, entertainment electronics, housework, home work, telework, leisure and lifestyle services, family as a target user group, future home, mobile programming, ubicomp.

Home automation and entertainment have been researched from multitude of viewpoints: networking, electronics engineering, gaming, sociology, interior decoration, archtecture... The challenge lies in forming a structured understanding from all such scattered information.

The ultimate goal is to find services instead of fancy technology or fascinating intuitive theories. This requires familiarizing oneself with the existing research and systematical work.

Student groups focus on modelling scenarios, services, use cases and realizations. Background material will be selected from literature, technological reports, scifi, movies, games, latest results of artificial intelligence and robotics, advances in sociology and psychology, studies on users etc. The key idea is to discover the long term consequences of evolving technologies, enables and changes in lifestyles. This requires systematic research work, mere brainstorming, introspection and intuition are worthless.

The aim of this seminar is to teach product development methodologies, working in a heterogeneous team of experts and systematic scientific analysis. Application area is mobile and ubiquitous computing. The work is done in the pre-product development phase, i.e., in the phase when the user groups are not known, technology is still evolving and ways of making profit still have to be found.

The seminar offers challenges to programming gurus, automation experts, content producers as well as usability experts. You may be a geek, nerd, hippie, guru or just an ordinary person, you are welcome to find new possibilities in this seminar.

Invitation to participate

PM&RG invites students, researchers and experts to join the seminar. The seminar sessions are open to all who want to deepen or update their knowledge on product development, home automation and ubiquitous computing.

Since the topic is relevant for various disciplines, it is beneficial to have participants with different backgrounds. Therefore, students beyond software technology are welcome and the credits for several course codes are negotiable. Please discuss with the course staff in such cases.

The seminar is arranged as T-106.850 Seminar on software technology (future code will be T-106.5800). Furthermore, guidance for students carrying out other software engineering, information processing science and knowledge engineering studies is available in the context of the seminar. This includes

Special assignment (e.g. T-106.830 Special assignment in software technology)
Project assignment (e.g. T-106.720 Project in software technology)
Individual studies (e.g. T-106.870 Individual studies)
Updating knowledge (without credit goals)

Background and relevance of the topic

Homes are changing:

Electronics is sneaking into homes and family lifestyle.
The technological as well as time and resources management needs of families are challenging and changing.
Ubicomp promises intuitive user interfaces and making interaction natural by hiding technology.
New kinds of appliances emerge as a result of mobile and ubiquitous computing.
Home entertainment is a megatrend.
Complexity of home services is increasing rapidly - people are snowed under information and gadgets.

Homes cannot be studied as a monolithic entity, but the problems must be analysed and structured. The classification can be based on various dimensions. The classifications will be further developed in the seminar, but educated guesses include:

Home entertainment, security systems, domestic appliances, control
Kitchen, nursery, living room, workroom, quest room, sauna
Parents, children, grandparents, pets
Housework, leisure time, relaxing, repair work

Before designers can make solutions, the problems must be found. This is not as straightforward as it sounds, but modelling must be applied in order to organize, structure and analyze the information available. The clue of this seminar is to apply modelling to a real and focused case that concerns various phenomena at homes.

For more information please send e-mail to Email address and include the marking "Home 2015" in the subject field.

Updated: 08.08.2009, page maintained by PM&RG