If you were under a rock yesterday and missed this tremendous announcement, I report it here for your perusal. Paul Dourish, original founder of the LUCI lab, has coordinated a multi-million dollar donation from Intel to UCI. This was in coordination with many other folks at UCI and represents a major step forward for the LUCI lab, the Informatics department, the Bren School, UCI, etc…

“UC Irvine will anchor a new $12.5 million, Intel-funded research center that applies social science and humanities to the design and analysis of digital information.

“Technology is profoundly entangled with our everyday lives. As researchers, we can’t get a handle on what’s going on by looking at technical factors alone. We have to study them in concert with human, social and cultural aspects,” said UCI informatics professor Paul Dourish.

He and Scott Mainwaring of Intel Labs will co-lead the center, dubbed the Intel Science & Technology Center for Social Computing, along with UCI anthropology and law professor Bill Maurer.

[cite: UCI Press Release]

Paul also adds some credit where credit is due in his Facebook post:

“Exhausted and exhilarated after a busy day in San Francisco announcing our new Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing to the world. This is a great collaboration with Scott Mainwaring, Bill Maurer, Phoebe Sengers, Tarleton Gillespie, Steve Jackson, Tom Boellstorff, Kavita Philip, Geof Bowker, Gillian Hayes, Melissa Mazmanian, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Erik Stolterman, Carl Disalvo, Chris Ledantec, Ian Bogost, Erica Robles, Helen Nissenbaum, and more. Very excited about our next steps!”

You can connect to the Center on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/istcsocial