Future Plans
I want to keep working at the intersection of solid engineering and genuine usability, likely toward roles where I can both build and evaluate systems, rather than only one or the other.
For the thesis itself, I'm already talking to a supervisor about a project in interaction technology, similar in spirit to PlantBand: building and rigorously evaluating an embedded interactive system again, rather than picking one side or the other.
What comes after that I'm not fully sure of yet, including whether research specifically is the direction I want. I'd like to keep working on the software at Charge Research Platform Volt, and lean further into UX or interaction technology (embedded systems), since that's genuinely the kind of work I enjoy doing.
The combination of hands-on technical depth and the ability to rigorously evaluate whether something actually works is something I don't see often in either pure CS or pure design profiles. Wherever I end up, research or not, I want to keep that combination.