Research Interests

Affective and intimate interactions, domestic design, socio-technical systems, user engagement, grouping and collaborative behaviors in computer-mediated social environments, critical HCI.

Research Themes

My current active research areas include the following:

Affective and Intimate Computing

In the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), there has been a movement in the last few years away from usability as the primary design objective towards an emphasis on affect and experience. I am interested in the user's production and interpretation of the affective dimension of technologies in use. Given that emotions are both biological and socially and culturally constructed and enacted, it is productive to gain insight into affect computing from these two distinctive yet related angles:

• The objective, context-sensitive experience: how biological measures inform our understanding of emotions
• The subjective, felt experience: how people understand and interpret their own emotions

Any patterns or relations between the objective, moment-to-moment measure of emotional impact and the subjective, post-interpretive understanding of emotions are keys to the design of intimate interactive technologies in both home and health settings that augment and support technology mediated experiences.

Productive Play : Emergent Forms of Collaboration in Virtual Spaces

The role of collaborative technologies in games, such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, do much more than enable chat between participants. They enable the emergence of persistent virtual relationships, and with them, new forms of social organization, modes of collaboration, microeconomies, and bureaucracies. As recent shifts in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) are beginning to show, these phenomena have implications for the design of collaborative software, for work and for pleasure. Developing strategies for researching them requires an interdisciplinary blend of methods, such as ethnography, experimental interaction design, evaluation/testing, user research, and critical interpretation. I am engaging in several studies that combine these approaches, with the hope of documenting and improving our understanding of player-player and player-interface interactions, focusing on issues such as the following:

• Emergent collaboration practices through play
• Patterns of communication and interaction
• The role of cultural differences in distributed team work
• Material ecology and interaction styles

Critical Issues in Interaction Design

This thread of my research explores the application of critical theory (e.g., hermeneutics and phenomenology, semiotics, feminism, Marxism, and post-structuralism, among others) in HCI. As we enter an age of social, cultural, and value-based computing, the study of HCI requires more rigorous grounding in critical and culture theory. I am especially interested in (1) how critical and cultural theory can be developed to enhance our understanding of people's subjective and social responses to experiences with technology, and (2) making critical and cultural theory accessible to interaction designers to inform and innovate design practices.