Welcome!
I am Nick LaLone, an Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the School of Interactive Games and Media. As a researcher saddled between social and technical concerns. So while I can program things, I am equally interested in the social life of technical objects, how technology influences and is influenced by society, and other types of problems.
Within that space, I focus on where technology helps and hinders those in the midst of a disaster. In addition to that focus on people needing to be safe, I also research how to train emergency managers, first responders, and folks in emergency services in ways that promote integration with information communication technologies. This is why i’m in a games program.
Below, i’ve tried to wirte a plain english description of my work, its goals, its aims, and philosophy. After that, i’ve tried to translate my work into the disciplines I send my work to.
The purpose of all this description is for potential students to quickly learn a lot about me. I am interested in PhD students who can understand technical objects (because our PhD program assumes you’re an adept programmer already) as well as:
Click one of the above for a description of my work.
Plain English
A few years ago, Leysia Palen and Ken Anderson published a paper in a journal called Science. In this article, they lament about how emergnecy management hasn’t ever been curious about the computer. They say:
Yet in the world of emergency management, we often
see a demand for science that “proves” behaviors.
If we are going to force emergency management to use technology, to change the very nature of how a practice functions, then we need to show that what we’d like to do is actually a net benefit and not needless fiddling. And yet, we keep attempting to fiddle without proving anything.
This is the basis of my career.
To me, I need to simultaneously prove that information communication technology can work as a useful tool in the midst of small to large scale hazard events whild also changing the fundamental nature of technological development to include the inevitable use of a device used by consumers for everything to ask for help that device.
In the meantime, hundreds, thousands, or millions of people are simultnaeously doing the same thing. Innumerable cries for help while those who can help have no capacity to know where a device is, how to gather and organize those cries efficiently, or how to share that information privately to those in the field in any meaningful way.
So I tend to work as a translator. I learn about how emergency management works, its disparate approaches couched in policy history, and do the same with Sociology, Computer Science, Disaster Science, and more.
I take that quote from Palen and Anderson not as an admission of failure, but as a realization for the importance of the work. And so I assmble allies, push against work being done without sufficient foundational research, and seek ways to expand the training of emergency managers in ways that promote practice that can not only change and adapt, but ask for more from folks seeking to develop new tools.
Human Computer Interaction
Human-Computer Interaction is often described as it is named, a discipline interested in how humans and computers get along. However, the computer has moved from a simple tool that is interacted with to a space that society itself interacts with. We use computation to bank, to get tickets for buses, trains, and to make reservations at restaurants. We use it to review restaurants, buy books, watch movies, attend meetings and conference where possible.
From HCI comes UX and all sorts of other kinds of studies of interaction. Because of the history of the term technology coming in to the English Language and the work of Charles Beard, technology is often seen as a litmus test for the power of culture. As a result, HCI can often fall into a deterministic mindset wherein a technical object can solve a societal problem. For many years, HCI has attempted to get into the space of disaster in the form of crisis informatics or the study of information flow during a hazard event.
For over 20 years, crisis informatics attempted to insert and/or provide a means through which computer scientists could help make sense of the way information flow works during each part of the 4-fold process from fema (Planning, Mitigation, Response, Recovery). While this work was fruitful for all manner of computer science,
Participatory design use outside of “normal” Seamless vs seamful Disaster as seam
Game Studies
Cooperative play Development of ttrpgs games-based learning that pre-dates games-based learning play and disaster
Disaster Science
Disaster science is mostly a form of sociology that seeks to expand how we understand how disasters impact humans and their environment. At the core, they charge that their goal is to deepen our capacity to plan and mitigate all phases of a disaster.
On my end, I tend to see the same frustrations from sociology in this space in that it cannot rectify the nature of how sociology splits humans from their artifacts.
And so my work mostly focuses on Quarentelli’s “no such thing as a natural disaster” and expands this meaning toward how culture and our artifacts shift the nature of