Paul Dourish

University of California, Irvine | UCI · Department of Informatics

Data do not speak for themselves. Data must be narrated—put to work in particular contexts, sunk into narratives that give them shape and meaning, and mobilized as part of broader processes of interpretation and meaning-making. We examine these processes through the lens of ethnographic practice and, in particular, ethnography’s attention to narrat...

Human–computer interaction (HCI) has traditionally framed itself as a design-oriented discipline. This position, in turn, frames design as HCI’s primary tool for intervening or producing change in the world. By taking up two apparently contradictory suggestions—that there is less design in the world than there might seem, and that there is more of...

Falling costs and the wider availability of computational components, platforms and ecosystems have enabled the expansion of maker movements and DIY cultures. This can be considered as a form of democratization of technology systems design, in alignment with the aims of Participatory Design approaches. However, this landscape is constantly evolving...

The Internet as we currently recognise it was institutionally established in 1983 when all hosts connected to the then ARPANET were required to have adopted the relatively new Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) technologies. Thirteen years later, in 1996, a replacement standard was established for the IP protocol, to resolve k...

Much of the language of computation is based on the idea that virtual experiences are, by definition, immaterial. On the other hand, in the context of mobile and ubiquitous computing, we have been reminded of the importance of the physical world, and many in HCI over the last decade have been intrigued by the possibilities of new interactive materi...

Algorithms, once obscure objects of technical art, have lately been subject to considerable popular and scholarly scrutiny. What does it mean to adopt the algorithm as an object of analytic attention? What is in view, and out of view, when we focus on the algorithm? Using Niklaus Wirth's 1975 formulation that “algorithms + data structures = program...

CSCW researchers have become interested in crowd work as a new form of collaborative engagement, that is, as a new way in which people’s actions are coordinated in order to achieve collective effects. We address this area but from a different perspective – that of the labor practices involved in taking crowd work as a form of work. Using empiri...

This special issue provides an opportunity to rethink how we approach, study, and conceptualize human relationships with, and through, technology. The authors in this collection take a multiplicity of approaches on diverse topics to develop a rigorous theoretical understanding for non-use, setting crucial groundwork for future research.

div class="page" title="Page 1"> What is the Internet like, and how do we know? Less tendentiously, how can we make general statements about the Internet without reference to alternatives that help us to understand what the space of network design possibilities might be? This paper presents a series of cases of network alternatives which provide a...

One of the most significant contemporary technological trends is institutional adoption and use of mobile and location-based systems and services. We argue that the notion of “location” as it manifests itself in location-based systems is being produced as an object of exchange. Here we are specifically concerned with what happens to institutional r...

Design research and the literature on sociomateriality emerge out of different academic traditions but share a common interest in the material. A sociomaterial perspective allows us to account for the complex ways people mingle and mangle information systems of all sorts into their social endeavors to accomplish organizational tasks. But, how do we...

Non-use goes beyond the absence of technology. Use and non-use are not binary opposites but represent different configurations of socio-technical practice. Studying these socio-technical configurations opens up central questions around 'the user' in HCI. A workshop has been organized at ACM?s CHI 2014 conference to address this issue. The participa...

Interacting with public displays involves more than what happens between individuals and the system; it also concerns how people experience others around and through those displays. In this paper, we use “performance” as an analytical lens for understanding experiences with a public display called rhythIMs and explore how displays shift social inte...

In taking into account the ways in which material and social realms are constitutively entangled within organizations, it is rhetorically tempting to say that technologies and social structures reconfigure each other. But what does it mean to reconfigure? How does one "figure" the other and how do we fully embrace a mutually constitutive relationsh...

In this paper, we discuss how a flourishing scene of DIY makers is turning visions of tangible and ubiquitous computing into products. Drawing on long-term multi-sited ethnographic research and active participation in DIY making, we provide insights into the social, material, and economic processes that undergird this transition from prototypes to...

In contrast to most research in HCI, this workshop focuses on non-use, that is, situations where people do not use computing technology. Using a reflexive pre-workshop activity and discussion-oriented sessions, we will consider the theories, methods, foundational texts, and central research questions in the study of non-use. In addition to a specia...

Design-oriented research is an act of collective imagining—a way in which we work together to bring about a future that lies slightly out of our grasp. In this paper, we examine the collective imagining of ubiquitous computing by bringing it into alignment with a related phenomenon, science fiction, in particular as imagined by a series of televisi...

Design-oriented research is an act of collective imagining--a way in which we work together to bring about a future that lies slightly out of our grasp. In this paper, we examine the collective imagining of ubiquitous computing by bringing it into alignment ...

Ethnography is an approach to understanding cultural life that is founded on the researcher’s participation, with the goal of understanding not simply what people are doing, but how they experience what they do. The researcher participates in the life of the target people, both to serve as a stimulus (asking questions) that generates reactions and...

In this article, we present and articulate the analytical lens of multisited design to illuminate transnational connections between sites of design, and aid in the translation of knowledge between designers and ethnographers. This position emerges from the authors' respective engagements in ethnographic research and design engagements with a slum c...

Online identities survive the deaths of those they represent, leaving friends and families to struggle with the appropriate ways to incorporate these identities into the practices of grief and mourning, raising important questions. How are practices of online memorialization connected to conventional rituals of grief and mourning? What is the role...

The article reviews the book 'Where the Action Is,' examining how the book invited new people to participate in a conversation that was already going on considering the nature of embodiment as a phenomenon in HCI. With the benefit of hindsight, and in light of the kinds of explorations explored in the articles collected in this issue, there are a n...

ACM CHI 2012 conference organized a panel titled 'Material Interactions - From Atoms and Bits to Entangled Practices'. The panel was specifically arranged to discuss assemblages of digital and physical materials and how these compositions might form and enable new experiences, as well as questions related to how we might conceptualize the inseparab...

Ubiquitous computing has a grand vision. Even the name of the area identifies its universalizing scope. In this, it follows in a long tradition of projects that attempt to create new models and paradigms that unite disparate, distributed elements into a large conceptual whole. We link concerns in ubiquitous computing into a colonial intellectual tr...

As practical resources and analytical precepts, "materials" have become central to the design and study of information technology. By considering how HCI has moved from material to materiality and, by implication, from practice to theory, we will examine different facets of material culture in HCI, drawing from domains just beyond it, such as craft...

This panel addresses some of the core aspects of the theme "It's the experience", for the CHI2012 conference by focusing on the materials that constitute the foundation for interaction with computers. We take a series of questions as a joint point of departure to consider the nature and character of "material interactions" in HCI. Specifically, we...

The diverse ways in which technologies are modified and appropriated into local contexts are an important theme in CSCW research. Today, translocal processes such as the formation of international corporations and the movement of people and ideas across nation states increasingly shape these local contexts of technology use and design. We draw from...

Studies from around the world show how the social media tools of Web 2.0 are shaping engagement with cities, communities, and spaces. Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis, and photo sharing and social networking sites, have made possible a more participatory Internet experience. Much of this technology is available for mobile phones, where it can...

Games are woven into webs of cultural meaning, social connection, politics, and economic change. This article builds on previous work in cultural, new media, and game studies to introduce a new approach to productive play, the promise of play. This approach analyzes games as sites of cultural production in times of increased transnational mediation...

Design and evaluation of user-generated media production and sharing in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) often focus on formal and informal media sharing, such as communication within social networks, automatic notifications of activities, and the exchange of digital artifacts. However, conceptual tools for understanding how people relate to the au...

This chapter examines the interplay between technology and the home’s social and moral organization, focusing on the fact that “the home” is a highly variable cultural object, in physical, social, economic, and emotional terms. It approaches this topic from three perspectives: The image of the so-called smart home and its connection to previous ima...

Ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp) is the label for a “third wave” of computing technologies. Following the eras of the mainframe computer and the desktop PC, it is characterized by small and powerful computing devices that are worn, carried, or embedded in the world around us. The ubicomp research agenda originated at Xerox PARC in the late 1980s;...

In this paper we argue that how scientific collaborations share data is bound up in the ways in which they produce and acquire that data. We draw on ethnographic work with two robotic space exploration teams to show how each community's norms of "data-sharing" are best understood as arising not from the context of the use or exchange of data, but f...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how current visual representations of organizational and technological processes do not fully account for the variability present in everyday practices. We further demonstrate how narrative networks can augment these representations to indicate potential areas for successful or problematic adoption of new...

Through a confluence of different disciplinary interests and trajectories, questions of the materiality of digital media and information technologies have recently come into relief. There are several different strains of work under this broad umbrella and it is valuable to distinguish between the varied concerns. This paper has two objectives. Firs...

Many HCI researchers have recently begun to examine the opportunities to use ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. This paper examines the way that traditional HCI discourse obscures political and cultural contexts of environmental practice that must be part of an effective soluti...

This workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the role of ubiquitous computing, the use of information and communication technologies and the politics of technological design in transnational practices. The ultimate goal of this workshop is to investigate the implications for the design and development of ubiqu...

In this paper, we describe the importance of mundane tools for design practitioners in India working with Euro-American clients. Our findings are based on a 7-week ethnographic study of a design firm based in Delhi, India. We analyze some highly-valued tools and software, such as post-its, as infrastructures with both practical and symbolic functio...

As our technologies travel to new cultural contexts and our designs and methods engage new constituencies, both our design and analytical practices face significant challenges. We offer postcolonial computing as an analytical orientation to better understand these challenges. This analytic orientation inspires four key shifts in our approach to HCI...

In an influential 2006 article, Jeanette Wing called for the elaboration of an approach to "computational thinking." Wing argued that computational thinking expresses the importance of computer science to general education, and provides a basis for interdisciplinary collaboration, by setting out the conceptual foundations of computational modeling...

A significant focus in the United States recently has been to increase engagement and interest in STEM curricula, particularly among girls and underrepresented minorities [3]. In this work, we take an approach to teaching and learning that supports flexibility, experimentation, and play with technology. With this approach, we aim to make STEM curri...

The authors suggest that postcolonial science studies can do more than expand answers to questions already posed; it can generate different questions and different ways of looking at the world. To illustrate, the authors draw on existing histories and anthropologies and critical theories of colonial and postcolonial technoscience. To move forward t...

In this paper, we present a view of design methods as discourse on practice. We consider how the deployment of a particular set of design methods enables and constrains not only practical action but also discursive action within the design practice. A case study of agile software development methods illustrates the ways that methods establish condi...

Coordination is central in CSCW systems design, where it is often considered as a process of bringing artifacts and activities together and making them part of a larger system. In this paper, we argue that existing conceptualizations of coordination in CSCW can be successfully extended with the notion of coordination by avoidance. We introduce this...

Many HCI researchers have recently begun to examine the opportunities to use ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. This paper examines the limits upon this work as currently construed. In particular, it argues that the political and cultural contexts of environmental practice must...

For many, an interest in Human-Computer Interaction is equivalent to an interest in usability. However, using computers is only one way of relating to them, and only one topic from which we can learn about interactions between people and technology. Here, we focus on not using computers – ways not to use them, aspects of not using them, what not us...

Location-based ubiquitous computing systems are entering mainstream society and becoming familiar parts of everyday life. However, the settings in which they are deployed are already suffused with complex social dynamics. We report on a study of parole officers and parolees whose relationships are being transformed by location-based technologies. W...

Introduction Recently, China's digital public and its connections to socio-cultural values and political-economic circumstances have received increased attention from mass media outlets. Here, digital culture in China is often portrayed as controlled and restricted in Information access, in cultural representation and individual choice. In November...

Understanding intercultural collaboration is a thorny problem in CSCW and organizational studies that grows every more important as globalization generates increasing intercultural interactions between individuals, groups, and technologies. We suggest that Postcolonial Studies may offer richer frameworks for analysis than taxonomic models of cultur...

Two workshops held at Pervasive 2008 and UbiComp 2008 brought together people who work on pervasive computing and HCI to tackle ecological concerns and use their expertise, skills, and insights to contribute to society’s sustainability and well-being.

When we think of mobility in technical terms, we think of topics such as bandwidth, resource management, location, and wireless networks. When we think of mobility in social or cultural terms, a different set of topics come into view: pilgrimage and religious practice, globalization and economic disparities, migration and cultural identity, daily c...

How do mobility and presence feature as aspects of social life? Using a case study of paroled offenders tracked via Global Positioning System (GPS), we explore the ways that location-based technologies frame people's everyday experiences of space. In particular, we focus on how access and presence are negotiated outside of traditional conceptions o...

Computer Science, as a single discipline, can no longer speak to the broad relevance of digital technologies in society. The Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, serves as the institutional home for research on relationships between technological, organizat...

Mobile technologies are deployed into diverse social, cultural, political and geographic settings, and incorporated into diverse forms of personal and collective mobility. We present an ethnography of transnational Thai retirees and their uses of mobile technology, highlighting forms of mobility that are spatially, temporally, and infrastructurally...

Researchers and designers are increasingly creating technologies intended to support urban mobility. However, the question of what mobility is remains largely under-examined. In this paper we will use the notion of aesthetic journeys to reconsider the relationship between urban spaces, people and technologies. Fieldwork on the Orange County bus sys...

Graphical virtual worlds are increasingly significant sites of collaborative interaction. Many argue that the simulation of the everyday environment makes them particularly effective for collaboration. Based on a study of visual practice in Second Life, we argue: first, that the practice of looking is more varied than it might at first seem; second...

Interactive information systems must not only encode information internally but must also produce externally visible representations, which may be inscribed into various forms, including visual and paper artifacts. In looking at visual information, many investigators have noted the relationship between representational forms and practice; maps, for...

The environmental movement, as a political body, is an alliance of many different groups with different agendas and goals, not always compatible. Nonetheless, as a matter of political pragmatism, the identification of "the environment" as a common focus binds these actors together – an act of strategic essentialism. Drawing on this observation and...

Traditional scheduling software enforces a single model of describing events – the time stream. However, studies of activity and information management show that people's conception of time and events is richer. We describe a scheduling system based on multiple parallel forms of de-scription. In addition to a richer description language, this sched...

A number of researchers have observed that ubiquitous applications pose new challenges to usability because their locus of interaction has moved away from the traditional computer desktop and been distributed through the everyday world. We argue that the distributed nature of ubicomp infrastructure also poses interaction challenges. Ubicomp systems...

This chapter critically examines the notion of "the city" within urban informatics. Arguing that there is an overarching tendency to construe the city as an economically and spatially distinct social form, we review a series of system designs manifesting this assumption. Systematically characterizing the city as a dense ecology of impersonal social...

Mobile and ubiquitous computing systems are increasingly of interest to HCI researchers. Often, this has meant considering the ways in which we might migrate desktop applications and everyday usage scenarios to mobile devices and mobile contexts. However, we do not just experience technologies in situ -- we also experience everyday settings through...

Many researchers and practitioners in user experience design have turned towards social sciences to find ways to understand the social contexts in which both users and technologies are embedded. Ethnographic approaches are increasingly prominent as means by which this might be accomplished. However, a very wide range of forms of social investigatio...

The rise of wireless networks and portable computing devices has been accompanied by an increasing interest in technology and mobility, and in the urban environment as a site of interaction. However, most investigations have taken a relatively narrow view of urban mobility. In consequence, design practice runs the risk of privileging particular vie...

At present, much work on urban computing focuses its efforts on solving the perceived problems of disconnection, disruption, and dislocation. A growing movement, however, points toward the value of considering a less instrumental account of city life. Through reflections on an ethnographic study of an urban motility site and the design of Undersoun...

One of the tropes of the age of ubiquitous computing is the migration of computation into new spaces. Domestic environments have been a particular focus of attention for many. However, these spaces are neither empty nor neutral. They are already populated by people and practices which shape both their physical form and cultural meaning. We want to...

Although the current developments in ubiquitous and pervasive computing are driven largely by technological opportunities, they have radical implications not just for technology design but also for the ways in which we experience and interact with computation. In particular, the move of computation ‘off the desktop’ and into the world, whether embe...

We trace how cultural probes have been adopted and adapted by the HCI community. The flexibility of probes has been central to their uptake, resulting in a proliferation of divergent uses and derivatives. The varying patterns of adaptation of the probes reveal important underlying issues in HCI, suggesting underacknowledged disagreements about vali...

How we design and evaluate for emotions depends crucially on what we take emotions to be. In affective computing, affect is often taken to be another kind of information - discrete units or states internal to an individual that can be transmitted in a loss-free manner from people to computational systems and back. While affective computing explicit...

Position paper for the workshop Imaging the City. Our recent work has focused on the city as a site of interaction and, in particular, how emerging technological infrastructures provide an opportunity to re-encounter urban space. One of the starting points for this work has been a reconsideration of the forms of representation of urban space that t...

While tangible interfaces open up new possibilities for input and interaction, they are also interesting because of the ways in which they occupy the physical world just as we do. We have been working at the intersection of three research areas - tangible interfaces, ambient displays, and collaboration awareness. Our system, Nimio, uses engaging ph...

Ubiquitous computing is unusual amongst technological research arenas. Most areas of computer science research, such as programming language implementation, distributed operating system design, or denotational semantics, are defined largely by technical problems, and driven by building upon and elaborating a body of past results. Ubiquitous computi...

Despite their rapid proliferation, there has been little examination of the coordination and social practices of cyberinfrastructure projects. We use the notion of "human infrastructure" to explore how human and organizational arrangements share properties with technological infrastructures. We conducted an 18-month ethnographic study of a large-sc...

In the ten years since the distinction between "place" and "space" emerged as a consideration for CSCW researchers and designers, the concepts have proven useful across a range of domains. In that same period of time, wireless and mobile technologies have given us new sites at which to examine the issues of space, practice, and mobility. These chan...

Much urban computing research focuses on cities as generic settings and containers of action. However, cities can also be viewed as products of historically and culturally situated practices and flows. When we view urban areas in this context, rather than as collections of people and buildings, infrastructure and practice are closely entwined. The...

As everyday life is increasingly conducted online, and as the electronic world continues to move out into the physical, the privacy of information and action and the security of information systems are increasingly a focus of concern both for the research community and the public at large. Accordingly, privacy and security are active topics of inve...

Although ethnography has become a common approach in HCI research and design, considerable confusion still attends both ethnographic practice and the metrics by which it should be evaluated in HCI. Often, ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems development; by that token, the major evalua...

I-schools (schools of information, of informatics, of information studies, and of information sciences) have emerged as a new academic home for university programs in HCI. This panel will discuss the significance of i-schools in US universities, related international university-level education movements and trends, the role and possible trajectory...

Reflective HCI is a style of HCI research that integrates technical practice with ongoing critical reflection. In the last thirty years, HCI researchers and practitioners have expanded their interests from aspects of cognitive ergonomics concerned with individuals using desktop computers at work to include concern for social and communal aspects of...

CSCW has long been concerned with the distribution of activities in time and in space, but the problems of distributed work have often taken analytic and technical prece- dence. In this paper, we are interested in the issue of temporality in collaborative work. In particular, we want to examine how the temporal organization of action is experienced...