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Course Outline

The Human-Computer Interaction Master's programme is internationally accredited and offered by Tallinn University’s School of Digital Technologies. It prepares specialists with the knowledge and skills to design meaningful technology.

Research Topics

User Experience

User experience is an emerging research area with a range of unresolved questions. One of these concerns how user experience can be measured. Researchers debate the meaningfulness, validity and usefulness of reducing subjective qualities such as fun, challenge and trust to numbers.

Research also explores how to move beyond using users’ perceptions, actions and reactions as data by incorporating neurophysiological responses into the measurement of user experience. Ongoing work focuses on trust and the hedonic aspects of user experience.

Possible topics in this area are:

1. Theory and scale development.
2. The study of neurophysiological correlates of user experience.

Physiological Computing

This area combines computer science, neuroscience, engineering and design for biohacking, understood here as measuring biomarkers and behaviours for artistic expression or to optimise health and wellbeing.

It relies heavily on personalisation techniques, which generally build on user models and methods for adapting interactions. The focus is on modelling and implementing personalisation techniques using neurophysiological computing.

These models are application-specific and account for both long-term user characteristics, which remain relatively stable over time, and short-term states that can change more rapidly. Long-term characteristics include personal preferences, attitudes, personality traits and prevailing moods. Short-term states include momentary emotional or cognitive states and feelings.

Possible topics in this area are:

1. The development of physiological user models for personalised systems.
2. The design, development and validation of novel applications of physiological computing for the arts, health or wellbeing.

Body-Centric Computing

Computing is moving closer to the body, as reflected in the growing number of research projects and commercial products. However, the research agenda, vocabulary and technologies needed to discuss, design and develop body-centric computing still need to be shaped.

Current gaps include ways to understand how body-centric interfaces are assigned roles and meaning; models for predicting users’ intentions when interacting with networks of body-centric technologies; and infrastructure that enables these interfaces to work seamlessly together and substitute for one another as needed.

Possible topics in this area are:

1. Theories and models that support reasoning about body-centric interactions.
2. The development of adaptive technical infrastructure to support dynamic reconfigurations of body-centric computing interfaces.

Design Theory and Methodology

Over the past three decades, interaction design has undergone shifts, connections and reframings in almost every aspect: how it is done, who does it, its goals and its outcomes.

These changes reflect a shift from designing things to designing interactions, first at the micro level and more recently at the macro level. They also reflect a shift from designing for people to designing with people, and more recently, to designing by people.

The focus is on empowerment and a new understanding of digital literacy. Having the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to use digital environments is no longer enough; people also need to be able to shape them.

Possible topics in this area are:

1. Exploratory research studies that develop new knowledge about how to facilitate the design of digital artefacts.
2. New understandings of interactions with digital artefacts, informed by existing theories, paradigms and methods.
3. Design and development research studies that create new design methods to improve specific activities involved in designing digital products and services.
4. Assessments of digital systems’ contexts of use and quality in use.
5. The interplay between emerging digital technologies and HCI concepts, theories, and methods.