Helmholtz lecture Antti Oulasvirta, University of Aalto: Psychology as the science of design: what psychological theories do

Psychology as the science of design: what psychological theories do

Antti Oulasvirta, University of Aalto (http://users.comnet.aalto.fi/oulasvir/ )

31 January 2020, 16:00 – 17:00. Location: Ruppert building, room Red

Kurt Lewin famously said that ‘There’s nothing more practical than a good theory’. But what makes a theory applicable to practical problems? Is it validity, reliability, or something else? Psychological science is traditionally concerned with these topics, but has looked less at the problem-solving capacity of theories, even though this question lies at the heart of practically areas of applied psychology. In this talk, I discuss psychological theories from the perspective of how they can be used to inform decision-making and even derive optimal solutions to well-stated problems. I discuss modern computational methods to that end, including optimization and  machine learning,along with implications to theory-formation and experimentation. Examples come mainly from our lab’s work on user interfaces.