Generation Y Interactions
The project is a collaboration between the Design Techniques (DT) research group of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering and Exact, which is an internationally renowned developer of business solutions for small to midsize organizations.
The DT research group focuses on developing tools and techniques to support designers and design teams in the early phase of the design process. In this phase designers create a variety of artifacts and representations, both of verbal and visual form, using traditional and new media, about the past, present, and future experiences of people with products. The research of the DT group is aimed at improving these artifacts and representations (tools) and the way they can be used in the design process (techniques). The DT group is strongly associated with the ID-StudioLab, which is a design research community on human-product interaction, bundling user-centered design elements from the 100 FTE design research program of IDE/DUT.
With their slogan “And it all comes together”, Exact serves entrepreneurial businesses with information technology by delivering business solutions (Exact, 2010). Exact supports people in being in control of their business and in having the freedom to concentrate on what is important to them. The solutions provide their customers the freedom to successfully address challenges and opportunities, creating value for their customers and ultimately for themselves. Exact serves local and international companies in more than 125 countries and offers solutions in more than 40 languages. The company was started by students in Delft in the Netherlands in 1984.
Today’s workplace is dominated by a workforce who has grown up interacting with computers through the ubiquitous set-up of keyboard, display, and mouse. Being somewhat reluctant when it comes to using new technology, they have adapted themselves as well as possible to this set-up, more or less quietly accepting its limitations. However, a new generation of workers is now quickly entering the market.
These so-called ‘Generation Y’ office workers, are digital natives, who have been experiencing digital technology their entire lives. Thus they have developed new ways and habits of interacting with their digital world, putting very high demands on the applications, services, devices, and networks that enable and support these interactions. While previous generations waited a week for a film to be returned from the photo lab, ‘Generation Y’ snaps digital pictures with their camera phones, e-mails them to friends, sends them to their Flickr account, and puts them on their Facebook page within minutes. They personalize their Yahoo home pages to get local headlines and weather, choose which news stories to read based on topic and create their own greatest hits collections by downloading their favorite songs. Songs that they share through social networks with a large community of ‘friends’, with whom they have frequent and immediate contact through email, instant messaging, and cell phones.
PROBLEM STATEMENT:
‘Generation Y’ fully embraces new and innovative technologies. They are tech-savvy multi-taskers, who are very demanding when it comes to their working equipment. But in today’s workplace, rich interactions between office workers and work context are still missing. The problem lies in the conflicts through how they interact with artefacts. Besides, advanced and visionary interaction techniques from telerobotics and computer games, as for example portrayed in movies such as Minority Report, are beginning to find their way into serious applications (e.g. multi-touch in the Apple iPhone or Microsoft Surface), but the balance falls through to completely visual interaction. Studies of human cognition, however, show that both visual and verbal thinking modes are important in creative work, and that different people use different styles, sometimes for different work. To cater to this new generation of workers, future business applications and services should thus fit in with richer ways of interaction that go beyond keyboard, mouse, and display. The goal of this PhD project is therefore to explore ‘Generation Y interactions’ within the context of office work, to develop new tools and applications that support these interactions and to study how they could affect future ways of working. Thus the main research question is: how can new interactions assist ‘Generation Y’ office workers efficiently and pleasantly in their work? The possible sub-questions include:
· What are the characteristics/classifications of ‘Generation Y’ office workers?
· What are the relevant trends/opportunities in interaction design?
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