Quick post that I'll probably expand upon in followup posts eventually, but this is one of the more inspiring talks I've heard in a long time!
"Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? | Ubuntu Summit 25.10" -- Scott Jenson
It's been a while since I've been reminded of what got me into HCI research in the first place. *THIS* is the type of stuff that I love doing TBH. It's really refreshing hearing such a senior industry figure talking about trying to get innovation in these areas happening again.
Another interesting point: The following interesting link from the end of the talk to some folk doing some very interesting stuff!
Ooh... now we're cooking! I've got a few project ideas that overlap quite heavily with some of these headlines on their landing page 🤓
(The main challenge currently is just finding the time + energy to actually work on these things... not to mention that fundamentally, making the prototypes I want to make is currently constrained by the tools I want not being in place)
Late-Night Rant-y Time:
The less positive takeaway from this talk was that it's also been a while since I've been reminded of why I largely got out of doing research like this: i.e. IME, it felt like academia and the greater world at large were all turning away from this sort of thing, but for different reasons and in different ways, leaving no sane pathway to go about this sort of thing!
e.g. Academia just got way more inward-looking in a perverted way, trying to prove increasingly prove to itself (and maybe anyone looking at it) that they were "doing real / actual science" with "rigour"... 🤮
Yeah... everything became so much more focussed on metrics - both internally (i.e. everything needed to be empirically + statistically-tested-to-the-nth-degree, with a pun-intended metric-shit-ton of work involved in getting anywhere near that point), and externally (i.e. the publication counts, and then the citation counts, etc.), and/or on "storytelling", and/or focussing on weird tangents (e.g. speculative AR/VR 3d-hand-gestural-next-gen-shit) that were increasingly divorced from realistically ever having any real world applicability or utility 🙄
Then, on the other hand, you had industry, largely turning its back on decades of hard-earned knowledge, stagnating and stripping back, and chasing its tail in the various hype bubbles to "build the next iPhone, and not end up being the next Nokia"
So that's how we're here LOL
I still don't think I'm suited to doing full-time research, and definitely have no desire on spending the majority of my time forever doomed to hand-hold novices (and/or having to rely on slightly a rotating cast of less inexperienced but way-less-competent-than-actual-top-flight-professional folk to get any progress made on any projects), while fighting political turf battles every other week with the other faculty, miser-ing budgets, and all the other crap (*ahem* massive paycut, while the "research office" does a rights grab on anything interesting you do come up with) ... yeah nah... At this point, I'm really not that interested in working at a University again anytime soon (if ever again) really...
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