Date: March 26th, 2009
Room: DMP 310
Speaker: John Canny
Title: Designing IT Systems in Context

Abstract:

The mix of computing and the everyday continues to surprise—not where we expected, e.g., smarthomes, but where we didn’t, e.g., Twitter, iTunes and Flickr. Designing well in new contexts requires expertise well outside of traditional computer science. I will discuss our experiences with an interdisciplinary de- sign lab (the BID Lab) at UC Berkeley and some of the research it produces. The talk covers two projects: a telepresence system called Multiview, which contradicts what we “knew” about video-conferencing and draws heavily upon social psychology and non-verbal communication; and MILLEE, a project for second-language learning on cell phones that exploits learning science. Both projects have benefited from deep domain expertise. I’ll close with some of the lessons we have learned about interdisciplinary sustainability.