Elegant technologies for complex lives
The Socio-Digital Systems (SDS) group of Microsoft Research aims to use an understanding of human values to help to change the technological landscape in the 21st century.
“Beyond making us all more productive and efficient, we ask how we can build technology to help us be more expressive, creative, and reflective in our daily lives.
Our group considers a broad range of human values, aims to understand their complexity, and puts them front and centre in technology development. An important aspect of this endeavour is the construction of new technologies that, in turn, we ourselves can shape. In so doing, we may create new ways that help us to actively realise our aspirations and desires, to engage with or disconnect from the world around us, to remember our past or to forget it, to connect with others or disengage from them. Important here are technologies which ultimately make our lives richer, and which offer us choice and flexibility in the things that we do.
SDS does this through the bringing together of social science, design and computer science. We believe that by understanding human values, we open up a space of new technological possibilities that stretches the boundaries of current conceptions of human-computer interaction.”
Some of their projects can be viewed online, but I was quite intrigued by the wealth of recent publications (2009 & 2010) which I grouped under a number of thematic headings:
Family archives
– Passing on and putting to rest: Understanding bereavement in the context of interactive technologies
– Opening up the family archive
Household messaging
– Designing a technological playground: A field study of the emergence of play in household messaging
– Bridging the gap between grandparents and teenagers: Lightweight vs. heavyweight contact
– Resilience in the face of innovation: Household trials with BubbleBoard
Social practices
– Collocated social practices surrounding photos
– Desiring to be in touch in a changing communications landscape: Attitudes of older adults
– Machine intelligence
Studies of technology use in the home
– Who’s hogging the bandwidth?: The consequences of revealing the invisible in the home
– Understanding family communication across time zones
– Home video communication: Mediating “closeness”
– Home curation versus Teen Photography: Photo displays in the family home
– Photo displays and intergenerational relationships in the family home
Supporting autobiographical memory
– Now let me see where I was: Understanding how Lifelogs mediate memory
– Narrative, memory and practice: Tensions and choices in the use of a digital artefact
– Fixed in time and “time in motionâ€: Mobility of vision through a SenseCam lens
– Reflecting on oneself and on others: Multiple perspectives via SenseCam
Specific projects
– Glancephone
– Hybrid interactive surfaces
– TellTable (also here)
– VPlay
