Information systems are being called upon not only to help keep us organized and productive, but also to help in the fabric of the way we live. We are starting to see them as solving social problems and reducing disruption; they help people enjoy others or even increase self-awareness. This talk will address notions of how we can introduce social awareness in our design practices and artifacts. I will frame the considerate system stance of social feedback to a user and describe results from a variety of research projects including systems supporting people in audio conference calls, TV interactions, saving energy, phone reactions, and voting technology.
Dr. Ted Selker is director of Considerate Systems research at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley and Visiting Scholar with the UC CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative.
Ted spent ten years as an associate Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory where he created the Context Aware Computing group and co-directed the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. Prior to his appointment at MIT, his successes at targeted product creation and enhancement earned him the role of IBM Fellow and director of User Systems Ergonomics Research. He has also served as a consulting professor at Stanford University, taught at Hampshire, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Brown Universities and worked at Xerox PARC and Atari Research Labs. Ted was co-recipient of the Computer Science Policy Leader Award for Scientific American 50 in 2004, the Telluride Tech fest award in 2008, and the American Association for People with Disabilities Thomas Paine Award for his work on voting technology in 2006.