Changes
Well, I had to try it out and I can say for sure now. Telecommuting is not for me. I’m a social creature so sitting isolated at the home office for 8-10 hours a day was doing some serious damage. The other part is how much the boundaries between work and … er, different work… blur when you have a home office. It’s one thing to bring tasks home with you, that I’m accustomed with, and do not excpect things to change as long as I actually like what I do for a living. But when I also have home interferring with my work throughout the day, with unwashed dishes and, just now, cats meaowing for food and demonstratingly jumping on the keyboard, that’s when the equation stops making any sense.
So, set on a steady path to find me some colleagues and a place to hide from cats and dishes, I had been checking out open positions for a while when I accidentally stumbled upon my dream job. Turned out they wanted me and I want them, harps and violins played in the heavens and… I will start at The Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laboratory at Helsinki University of Technology in March, as part of the Art & Magic research group headed by Tapio Takala. My first task will be with the research project Interactive Embodied Emotional Experience (IEEE for short) involved with research on embodied experiences, mimic interaction and emotionally responsive user interfaces.
As I am writing this, I feel really happy with my decision, even more so than yesterday when I went there to sign the papers. The combination of hardcore technology expertise with artistic and expressive interfaces is a delicious blend as such, but it does also provide for means to investigate many serious questions concerning user experience and interaction with/within information systems. This project will also allow me to return to my investigation of interactive sound interfaces, which has been on hold too long already.
