[UWAB] FW: [Gvu-bag] GVU Brown Bag September 20, 2007 in TSRB 132 at 12:00

Biggers, Maureen Short maureen at cc.gatech.edu
Mon Sep 17 15:00:16 EDT 2007


In case anyone is interested in attending!

 

Maureen

 

>From the Margin to the Center: Exploring "Artsy" Human Centered
Computing

Abstract:

Although HCI has traditionally anchored itself epistemologically between
the twin rocks of engineering/computer science and cognitive/laboratory
behavioral science, contemporary HCI practice has been additionally
enriched by a diverse array of disciplinary ways of knowing, from
qualitative social science to product design to network analysis. 

Recently, we have seen an upswell in interest in the arts, which offers
new opportunities for conceiving of and designing for interaction, but
simultaneously provides challenges for our traditional
conceptualizations of what it means to do and to know in HCI. Given that
intellectual issues in the contemporary arts are relatively unknown in
our field, the status of arts-based work as research can be unclear to
HCI researchers. When work in the field is labelled "artsy," this can
often imply that it is pretty but not practical, creative but not
generalizable, provocative but not a fundamental knowledge contribution,
interesting but not valid until recast as science. The result is a
missed opportunity, a marginalization of the insights the arts could
offer us.

 

In this talk, I will explore what it might mean to take the arts
seriously as a way of knowing and as an intellectual resource for HCI
practictioners. I will describe a design experiment through which my
group realized both the value of an aesthetic approach to affective
computing and the deep-seated consequences of an aesthetic orientation
for design and evaluation. I will argue that the arts provide a unique
lens into design for the political, social, and personal dimensions of
computing. Through analyses my group has conducted of the uptake of
cultural probes and Situationism in HCI, I will explore the challenges
and opportunities that the arts offer HCI.

 

Bio:

Phoebe Sengers is an assistant professor in Information Science and
Science & Technology Studies at Cornell, where she leads the Culturally
Embedded Computing group. She works at the intersection of HCI with
cultural studies of technology, developing applications that respond to
and encourage critical reflection on the place of technology in culture.
She uses insights from cultural analysis of IT to identify and rethink
the assumptions underlying technologies, to build systems to support
critical reflection on emotional and social experiences, and to develop
new techniques for designing systems, including the use of
self-experiment in design and new forms of evaluation for open-ended
systems. Before coming to Cornell, she worked as a research scientist in
the Media Arts Research Studies group at the German National Computer
Science Research Center (GMD) and was a Fulbright Scholar at the Center
for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. In August
1998, she graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a self-defined
interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Theory.

Lunch will be rolled sandwiches (hovan-style) from St Charles Deli.
Lunch wil be ready by 11:30; the talk begins at 12:00.

Thank you.

Don 

 

Don Schoner

Assistant to Director of GVU

Georgia Institute of Technology

Technology Square Research Building (TSRB)

85 5th Street, NW

Atlanta, GA  30308-1030

Phone: 404-894-4488

Direct Line: 404-894-0075

Fax: 404-385-2386

Fax: 404-894-0673

schoner at cc.gatech.edu <mailto:schoner at cc.gatech.edu> 

 

"One thing about trains: it doesn't matter where you're going.  What
matters is that you decided to get on." 

--The Polar Express 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/mailman/private/uwomen/attachments/20070917/f160ad1a/attachment-0001.html
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: ATT15590506.txt
Url: https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/mailman/private/uwomen/attachments/20070917/f160ad1a/ATT15590506-0001.txt
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: ATT15590507.txt
Url: https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/mailman/private/uwomen/attachments/20070917/f160ad1a/ATT15590507-0001.txt


More information about the uWomen mailing list