A Little About Me!
I am a Sociologist who works in Human-Computer Interaction spaces. This is a fancy way of saying that I am both a social and technological researcher or that I exist as a researcher of socio-technical. That said, as a researcher of the socio-technical, it is sometimes difficult to describe exactly what I do for a living or as an academic as I tend to exist between a number of disciplinary spaces.
More plainly, I am an Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the School of Interactive Games and Media in the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. My traditional focus in my work are those contexts where normalcy breaks down, where technology often isn’t meant to work, and above all, the social contract is damaged, broken, strained, or otherwise incompatible with the context of use.
Generally, this means that I will study disaster contexts, how folks train for disaster contexts, and the gap between how technology works and how technology isn’t designed for a world that itself needs to be able-bodied.
I am often stuck between social and technical concerns. I can write code, work with hardware, and other technical objects; however, I am equally capable in the social life of those technical objects, how technology influences and is influenced by society, and other types of issues that keep us uncomfortable and saying things like, “This isn’t intuitive” or “Do your research.”
You may wonder why i’m in a games program.
This is an interesting question. Generally, we spend our lives as children playing in order to learn how to live in the world we will become an adult in. Once we become an adult, the way we define play tends to mean that we no longer are playing but are doing. And yet, this is very far from the truth. I am in a games program because I can still consider how we play as children, adults, or with other species, how games reflect that reality, and what impact professionalism has on play.
Below, i’ve tried to write a description of my work, its goals, its aims, and philosophy. After that, i’ve tried to translate that work into the disciplines I publish in.
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
I am often focused on disaster contexts. How do we ask for help? How do those people who are meant to hear our asking for help hear us? How do we coordinate everything? And so, I try and look at the technologies, the training, the people, and the situations they find themselves in. And yet, technology is often a problem. The best way to consider it came around A few years ago. Leysia Palen and Ken Anderson published a paper in a journal called Science. In this article, they lament about how emergency 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 a group to use information communication technology, then often times we will need to “prove” that it works. And yet, we ignore the way technology requires us to be versus the reality of those who would respond to disaster. In order 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.
While I have concentrated on disaster contexts, this work is easily extended to almost any space that requires human-machine pairings. Technology needs to be trained to work in specific contexts for specific reasons that are both alterable and adjustable over time.
To me, I need to simultaneously prove that information communication technology can work as a useful tool in whatever industry i’m working with while also changing the fundamental nature of technological development to include the inevitable use of a device used by consumers for everything.
So I tend to work as a translator. I learn about how an industry works. Along the way, I also engage with that industry’s disparate approaches couched in policy as well as other kinds of academic research.
I take that quote from Palen and Anderson not as an admission of failure, but as a realization for the importance of understanding a field in as native a way as possible.
And so I assemble 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, it has not been useful for emergency management. As a result, my work tends to focus on 3 specific questions:
- Within the confines of stable use environments, what aspects of stable use can be used to help during periods of instability?
- What parts of the design of software are we taking for granted or have not yet examined in depth?
- What parts of computing history (or “bleeding edges from the past”) could we pick back up and develop further?
Typically, I will pursue some form of participatory design where I work with folks in an industry to come up with software requirements. Where I am slightly different than the participatory design folks is that I seek to develop a world that software and hardware can fit in. At the moment, this is focused on low resource, low memory software that can be used with minimal power, supervision, connectivity, or training. As a result, I can be seen as an HCI person who focuses on work outside of what we would consider able-bodied use. In addition, I tend to think about software in terms of seams (like so many HCI folks these days). Seamless tends to focus on hiding the computer from the user and presenting an operating environment that can be configured as needed. Seamful, on the other hand, represents itself as something that requires effort, requires not design work, but in understanding the world that technology exists in. It abandons all UX in favor of institutional knowledge the software is for. Disaster is often a moment that manifests these seams and so this is where I tend to focus my work as it helps answer my essential questions.
HCI research that forms the foundation of my work
- Carroll, John M., and Mary Beth Rosson. “Paradox of the active user.” Interfacing thought: Cognitive aspects of human-computer interaction. 1987. 80-111.
- This paper keeps me focused on this idea that no matter what we do, we will never be able to design software that folks automatically accept. From here, I tend to stay away from generalizability, UX in nearly every form, and focus on bridging need with intuition. This is not easy though so it is and will remain, a work in progress.
- Dix, Alan. “Human–computer interaction, foundations and new paradigms.” Journal of Visual Languages & Computing 42 (2017): 122-134.
- As a sociologist, I worry all the time about the very fabric of society becoming digitized and that we will manifest it as poorly designed, poorly optimized apps or artificial intelligence. This piece focuses on that very topic and discusses ways that (to be very succinct), society itself has become a user.
- Dourish, Paul. Where the action is. Cambridge: MIT press, 2001.
- While this book focuses on launching ubiquitous computing, I tend to use it as a way to describe a fundamental problem in computing. That problem is relatively simple, we have never changed how computers work. We stare at rectangles, click on things arranged in a rectangle, and that’s about it. Even in Virtual Reality where we could look at anything any way we wanted, we still stick with rectangles. So there are aspects of design that tend to be unchangable. As a result, we tend to look toward the space of interaction and its underlying logic. I tend to think of this text as a justification of the idea that would come to dominate software design: 1-off apps.
- Harrison, Steve, Phoebe Sengers, and Deborah Tatar. “Making epistemological trouble: Third-paradigm HCI as successor science.” Interacting with computers 23.5 (2011): 385-392.
- In sociology, my background is in gender studies and so I tend to see technology use as masculine, militaristic, and forcibly conformist. This piece does a fantastic job of making good trouble. To me, the spreading of work focusing on standpoint epistemology is fine, but I tend to use this piece in an effort to unbury the ontologies that form the basis of those epistemologies. This is why I often will focus on history as we can evaluate previous standpoints and their connections to new ones.
- Nardi, Bonnie A. “Studying context: A comparison of activity theory, situated action models, and distributed cognition.” Context and consciousness: Activity theory and human-computer interaction 69102 (1996): 35-52.
- Human-machine pairings are difficult to understand. On the one hand, psychology has allowed us to understand how individual users interact with individual machines. And yet, on the other hand, we’re often stuck working with the concept of a single user, using a single product, in a single concept. This is where the sociology of things can come in handy. These 3 theories provide a useful way to unbury many assumptions of the world that we can make when studying technology use. However, they are also often misconstrued, mixed up, or otherwise misinterpreted. This piece helps a TON, especially for newer researchers.
Game Studies
In sociology, I was asked to read Homo Ludens as a Masters Student. I had been struggling to understand the nature of play in society and how games essentially canned play. I then began a journey through the intersection of pop culture, internet culture, media studies, and more. To me, game studies is the study of an almost invisible aspect of humanity, how we learn to be human. There are innumerable rules, procedures, policies, and expectations that exist. If we start reducing them and reducing them, and reducing them, we can see an origin of society, of culture, with the establishing of the first rule and the first keepers of rules, the first codifying of the word play.
Play, to me is best defined by Ian Bogost who says play is, “.” And play is both not serious and very serious as we see things like fighting disease, war,
Cooperative play Development of ttrpgs games-based learning that pre-dates games-based learning play and disaster
Essential HCI research that forms the foundation of my work
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
Essential HCI research that forms the foundation of my work
Sociology
Sociology is where I began my academic life. At its core, Sociology is often defined as examining how humans interact with different things that humans have built like the economy, family structures, and norms. A lot of the foundation of sociology is in trying to understand society as this entity that guides our actions and is somehow outside of us. From that standpoint, we tend to see statistics as this cornerstone of understanding society with macro and micro structures being tended to by quantitative measures. These originate around the era of Emilie Durkheim and have risen and fallen with society over time. While I was trained in that space, I tend to fall on the side of Leibniz or Tarde rather than Newton or Durkheim in Sociology. These groups say that we humans are maintainers and creators of society with innumerable associations across every moment, of every day, with even more non-humans created and imbued with functions according to needs translated by their designers. As we study the world, we study ourselves, we seek to understand ourselves. This is not to say I am a constructionist though I do tend to belong to that sphere. I just believe that society is constantly being constructed and that the result of the construction is sociality rather than social being used to construct things.
Essential Sociology texts that form the foundation of my work
These texts are mostly method focused as this is where my variety of method approaches are.
- Connell, Raewyn. Masculinities. Routledge, 2020.
- Latour, Bruno. The pasteurization of France. Harvard University Press, 1993.
- de Tarde, Gabriel. Monadology and sociology. re. press, 2011.
- Veblen, Thorstein, ed. The engineers and the price system. Routledge, 2017.
- Altheide, David L., and Christopher J. Schneider. Qualitative media analysis. Vol. 38. Sage publications, 2012.