Human-Centered Computing Paul Dourish Xerox PARC

My Background Currently: –Computer Science Laboratory, Xerox PARC working on Placeless Documents, a document management system Previously: –Discourse Architecture Lab, Apple Research working on novel architectures for malleable interactive systems –Rank Xerox EuroPARC working on media spaces, collaboration toolkits & workflow systems.

My Background Research foci: –HCI relationship between system design and interaction relationship between social and design sciences –CSCW computation as a medium for interaction and collaboration support for the fluidity and evolution of practice

Focus on Practice It’s not about users… It’s not about interfaces… It’s about practice –what people do in the course of doing what they do –routine, informal, emergent, improvised, varied… –Q’s: How does practice emerge and develop? How is it sustained, communicated and evolved?

Foundational Connections Building a foundation for design –systematic relationships between social and technical Foundational elements –generally operative social processes not specific practices, but the mechanisms that sustain them –computation not systems, but the mechanisms from which they are constructed –e.g. how does abstraction in software interfere with intersubjective understandings?

Some Implications Consider computation as a medium –practice is not embedded in computer systems, but performed through them Develop theoretical underpinnings –need strong grounding in order to make generalisable claims more than just how one set of users in one setting can use one system

Some Implications Strong computer science, too –not just system design, but the nature of systems Study real world settings –experimental subjects have behaviours, but people in real settings have practices