The Computing Innovation Fellows Project

Posted on: Monday, May 17th, 2010
Broad Research Area: Graphics / Visualization, HCI / CSCW, Social Computing / Social Informatics, Software Engineering

Research Interests:

My research team is engaged in projects involving design, meta-design, virtual worlds, virtual teams, and collaborative work. We often work on this research in the context of software engineering and particularly, collaborative software engineering. However, we also work in a number of other contexts, such as the knowledge work carried out in large organizations and communities of practice, or the play and work carried out in online games and virtual worlds. Depending on the research context, we perform field (ethnographic-like) studies, laboratory studies, and usability inspections to gather data about people’s behavior. Often our work involves developing prototype software tools or new user interfaces and evaluating them. Sometimes our work is only about observation and analysis.

Recently, we constructed visual tools to help software developers and managers maintain an awareness of distributed software development activities. We are currently investigating ways these same tools can support trust in global software development teams. We also are carrying out a small scale ethnographic study to better understand design in virtual worlds and extend theories of meta design based on our findings.

I have always been keenly interested in what technology and structure imply about human behavior and have a desire to craft work environments that augment human capabilities. An example was my dissertation work about a software tool that improved the performance of otherwise poorer performers on programming tasks without hindering better performers. Thereafter, I was always interested in projects that informed on how individual differences could be reduced. In addition to augmenting human capabilities, I am interested in user interfaces that improve the human experience for their end users. I sometimes think of this in terms of creating more humane interfaces or interfaces that support our humanity. Increasingly, I am drawn to research in the humanities for insight.

I am greatly influenced by the writings of Carl Jung, Herbert Simon, Douglas Engelbart, Donald Schoen, Donald Norman, Marvin Minsky, Mitch Walker, my own graduate advisor, Gerhard Fischer, and his colleagues at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a number of researchers in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Queer Studies, Activity Theory, Participatory Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Science and Technology Studies.

Contact Information:

dfredmil@uci.edu with UIFellows in the subject line somewhere.