University usability project for Plasma Active?

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hey everyone,
as most of you probably know, I'm currently working at the Institute of 
Ergonomics Darmstadt and I'm part of the usability group there.
Now I had the idea to do a science project with KDE and since Plasma Active is 
my "main project" within KDE at the moment, I'd prefer to do something for PA.
Before I think more specifically about what could be an interesting project, 
I'd first like to ask if you would like to cooperate with an academic 
institution.
We are a group of usability experts and visual/interaction designers, so 
things we could do include:
- Doing formal usability testing (including eye tracking) with more than my 
usual handful of participants
- Tackling complex UI design problems
- Providing more general research-based guidelines
- Inventing new interaction paradigms

What we can't do is code, so we'd have to rely on you to implement things. Of 
course we can't force you to implement anything, but if nothing we come up 
with gets implemented in the end, this would of course be rather frustrating 
;)

KDE's experience with academia has been rather mixed in the past mostly due to 
difficulties in communication/coordination, but since I'm part of both the core 
PA team and of the institution, I think we have an opportunity to make such a 
collaboration a success for both sides.

So what do you think? Would you be interested in such a project in general?
Cheers,
Thomas