Lars Hallnäs, Interaction Design

Lars Hallnäs was appointed Visiting Professor of Interaction Design on June 1, 2005. He was born in Stockholm 1950, studied composition with, among others, Ingvar Lidholm at The Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, and later philosophy at Stockholm University, with Dag Prawitz. He received his PhD on a thesis in mathematical logic at Stockholm University 1983. After two years work as research assistant at the Department of Philosophy, Stockholm, he worked at Swedish Institute of Computer Science in Kista before moving to Chalmers and the Department of Computing Science. During 1999-2002 Lars worked with experimental interaction design at Interactive Institute in Göteborg. He returned to Chalmers to take part in establishing interaction design as an area of research and teaching - including a PhD programme in interaction design. He was appointed Professor of Interaction Design at The Swedish School of Textiles, University College of Borås in 2003. Besides academic work he has from 1970 also been engaged in artistic work. Research summary Interaction design concerns the design of computer based products and systems with a focus on the design of intended use, i.e. with focus on the usability of products and systems. Lars has in his research mostly been working with aesthetical aspects of computational technology as a design material, on one hand through design experiments testing and developing design methods and on another hand through theoretical work aiming at developing the foundations of design practice and to more closely relate interaction design to traditional industrial design. Computational technology is, as a material, just as the musical material, in a certain sense temporal and abstract – it builds things only when a computer executes a program. A central theme in the research Lars is working with concerns the development of methods and concepts that specifically supports these properties of the material in the process of designing. The research aims at the development of interaction design aesthetics and has its foundation in general design aesthetics as well as in basic research in computer science and engineering.