Portraitfoto Jan Dittrich

Jan Dittrich

Learning Skills with Media Instructions

Jan Dittrich researches how people use instructions to acquire skills. To do this, he compares the use of recipes for gluten-free baking with the use of instructions for programming. Instead of assuming a separation between planning and execution, it is assumed that this skillful action requires the coordination of attention and situation (Ingold, 2001) as well as reflection in the action itself (Schön 1982).

Research interests

  • Situated Cognition and Learning
  • Non-Abstract Knowledges
  • Creative-, Participatory-, and Collaborative Research
  • Innovation- and Tech Cultures

Vita

  • 2016 – 2022
    UX Designer/Researcher at Wikimedia Deutschland.
  • 2013 – 2015
    Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Professorship for Instructional Design at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar.
  • 2012 – 2015
    M.F.A. Media Arts and Media Design at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar.
  • 2009 – 2012
    B.F.A. Media Arts and Media Design at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar.

Publications

  • 2012
    Research Paper Kulik, Dittrich, Fröhlich: The Hold-and-Move Gesture for Multi-touch Interfaces. In: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services (MobileHCI ’12). pp. 49–58, September 2012.

Talks, Workshops, and Events

  • 2020
    Talk Five reasons why we think Agre’s ‘Surveillance and Capture’ is a classic STS paper with Lisa Conrad as part of the panel Panel on Classic STS Papers by Nelson and Sismondo, EASST 2020.

Teaching

  • Summer Term 2023 | U Bremen
    Seminar User Experience Research
  • Winter Term 2022/23 | U Bremen
    Seminar Creating Games and Computer Arts as a Medium for KuWis
  • Winter Term 2020/21 | Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
    Seminar Algorithms and Activities
  • Winter Term 2013/14 | Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
    Werkmodul Human Centered Design Research
  • Summer Term 2013 | Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
    Werkmodul Human Centered Design Research
  • Winter Term 2012/13 | Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
    Werkmodul Human Centered Design Research
every day

“Living in contradictions is what we experience every day. Why do we know so little about it?”

Gisela Febel
idea of democratic critique

“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”

Martin Nonhoff
driver

“Contradictions are an important driver of scientific practice and knowledge.”

Norman Sieroka
space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

Julia Lossau
Is contradiction eurocentric?

“Is contradiction a eurocentric concept, operational phenomenon, and instrument of power?”

Kerstin Knopf