Focusing on Focus

I’ve been at this grad school thing since 2004. When returned to academia, I had a two-year timeline to get my Masters degree before venturing back out into the work world. I had an opportunity to extend my education to a doctorate, however, and continue exploring my intellectual interests, so here I am.

As many people have told me (including my own mirror), I have a problem with focus. Lots of things are interesting, and part of my daily joy is contemplating how disparate ideas connect to each other. That is a limitless pursuit, though, as the matrix of “lots of things” by “lots of things” would take several lifetimes to conquer. Focus, for me, was just learning to be OK saying no. I tried on projects in sports networks, pedagogy, sustainability, education, communication theory, political wikis, tangible computing, social media services, and design theory. I believe there are common threads running through my perspective on all of those, but taking the long way home hasn’t gotten me very far.

Enter social robotics.

Why I Chose Robots

The upside to having no clear research focus is that there isn’t much committing me to a particular path. I chose a completely new dissertation topic for three important reasons:

The local landscape has changed

The School of Informatics & Computing has taken steps over the past year not only to provide additional physical and financial resources to the pursuit of robotics research, but there are also new human resources that make this area compelling. The program now has expertise in robot culture and technology to augment the current faculty and research taking place at the school.

My career plans have changed

Much of my fretting over dissertation topic was tied to a reinforced belief that what I did for my Ph.D. research would shape the kinds of jobs I could (or could not) get in the future … as an academic. While I intended to go become a professor somewhere, there was a lot of internalized pressure to make this decision of topic deliberate. Having seeing the strings at the puppet show, though, my interest in pursuing some tenure track position has diminished. If I want to head into the world of startups and community design, the specific topic becomes much less important to me than an opportunity to polish my process.

My expectations for the future have changed

Whether they are called robots or not, the trajectory for technology that embeds constructed intelligence and places interactions in the physical world makes the area of social robotics meaningful. Regardless of my work after graduation, I think I can be changed by my experience researching robots in the same way I already have being exposed to HCI design and complex systems perspectives.

Once I accepted those insights, it has become much easier to see the academic world in a more practical way.

Using Touchstones

I still let my interests wander, of course. The difference is that I feel I have just three lenses through which to view new information:

• How does it impact understanding of how humans and robots relate (Dissertation)
• How does it help explain and shape the dynamics of organizations? (SociaLens)
• How does it guide the design of online connection through expressive activity? (pixSmix)

All of these have common themes of complexity, connection, community, and embodiment. Pursuing any one of them has often resulted in new insights for the others. I don’t think about those connections, though, when I’m watching someone present or reading a paper. I summarize and uncover the insights of the new information, and then apply those insights to the above questions.

I don’t know whether this is actually effective, but I certainly feel more productive in advancing each of these projects.

Still a Spinning-Wheels Danger

That isn’t to say everything is getting processed in a timely fashion. Paul Marshall came in to town yesterday to talk about various applications of different notions of embodiment. This came a couple hours after another weekly session with my dissertation advisor. My mind still races with all the new stuff, and sometimes it is too much to turn into a concise insight quickly.

This post is a response to not being able to adequately process the new information from yesterday. I feel compelled to attempt to publish something every day (even though I am forgiving of myself when i don’t) but I also want it to be more than just a reflection of someone else’s work. I want to be able to answer the question of relevancy with my dissertation by making connections between different sources. It was taking too long, and the longer it took the more I felt like Grady Tripp from Wonderboys, doomed to keep writing without closure.

This post is mainly for the closure.