Welcome!
As a researcher of the socio-technical, it is sometimes difficult to describe exactly what I do for a living.
My name is Nick LaLone and I am an Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the School of Interactive Games and Media. 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 removed.
I have a background in Sociology that was messed up by a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction. As a result, 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.”
Some may ask 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, how games can play, and what impact professionalism has on play.
Below, i’ve tried to write 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 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 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.
While this piece discusses emergency management, I generally apply this concept to every part of my career.
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.
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.
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 the work. 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,
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