Photo courtesy of flickr:eye2eye
Congratulations to Lilly Irani on passing her Advancement to Candidacy Exam!
Thesis: Seeing Practice in Second Life and Design Life
Committee:
Paul Dourish (Chair)
Gillian Hayes
Bonnie Nardi
Kavita Philip
Keith Murphy
This work presents two projects concerned with technological practices — one of being a Second Life resident and one of being a technology designer. These projects see the cultures of Second Life and of design, like cultures more generally, as fluid, produced through everyday social interaction conditioned by history, contingency, and imagination.
Part I: Situated Practices of Seeing: Visual Practice in Second Life
Graphical virtual worlds are increasingly significant sites of collaborative interaction. Many argue that the simulation of the everyday environment makes them particularly effective for collaboration. Based on a study of visual practice in Second Life, I argue: first, that the practice of looking is more varied than it might at first seem; second, that we need to look beyond the virtual in understanding virtual worlds; and third, that implementations blend interactional practice. I detail basic tools for seeing in Second Life’s virtual world client. I then describe the diversity of cultural practices of seeing the world and seeing audience that have emerged among users, with implications for sociality and self-presentation in a virtual world. I suggest that the value of virtual worlds as sites of collaboration might lie more in their richness and openness to appropriation and flexibilities of visual practice that engenders than in their simulation of everyday interaction. Visual practice helps to understand the particular, learned, and situated ways people come to see the world in this instance, a virtual one.
Part II: Transnational Technodesign
It is well-established that technologies that make sense within one cultural context may be understood and adopted entirely differently when put into a different cultural context. In response to the many difficulties and misadventures of technology transfer, there is a growing response that calls for the export of *design methods* rather than designed objects. Equipped with proper methods, it is often assumed that people can design technologies that suit their settings and purposes. Yet there are many reasons to believe that design methods, such as usability testing, participatory design, or requirements engineering, cannot travel so easily. Prescriptions of practice that work in one cultural context may not work in another.I present reflections on a particular case of design research in an Andhra Pradesh village — a case of surprises and methodological mutation and highlight directions for future work.
Congrats Lilly!!
Composition of Real-Time and Hybrid Distributed Computing Systems in High-Safety Ubiquitous Computing Societies - May 1st, 2006
The speaker at this Friday’s Informatics Seminar will be Kane Kim. This
week’s seminar will be a joint seminar between the Department of
Informatics and the Department of Computer Science. The Informatics
Seminar this week will be held on Friday at 3pm in ICS 432, followed by
a social hour at 4pm. See you there.
Abstract:
” Emergence of ubiquitous computing societies (UCSs) means enormous
increase in both the number of computing nodes connected together and
the number of distributed computing (DC) applications. That in turn
means enormous increase in the complexity of DC occurring. Without a
new-generation DC software engineering technology, application systems
such as next-generation multi-party video-conferencing systems,
real-time virtual reality systems, systems of cooperating autonomous
ground vehicles, and next-generation secure villages and towns, cannot
be constructed with sufficient economy, efficiency, and reliability. A
major part of a new-generation DC software engineering technology should
be a new-generation software building-block (BB). A substantial
percentage of new-generation DC applications are of RT computing types
which involve actions subject to relatively high-precision timing
requirements. Therefore, desired aBBs must be effective in constructing
RT DC application systems.
The TMO (Time-triggered Message-triggered Object) programming and
specification scheme is intended to facilitate RT distributed
programming and software engineering in a form which software engineers
in the vast business software field can adapt to with relatively small
efforts. It is also aimed for enabling system engineers to produce
certifiable RT computing systems for safety-critical applications in
cost-effective and sufficiently confident manners. Its support tools
can be based on well-established OO programming languages such as C++,
C#, and JAVA and on ubiquitous commercial RT operating system kernels or
even on MS Windows. In addition, the TMO scheme facilitates an
attractively simple approach to parallel and distributed RT simulation.
Experiences have shown that undergraduate senior students can learn the
TMO tools and methodology and become reasonably proficient in networked
embedded system programming. In this seminar, the underlying design
paradigm and the essence of the scheme, the tools (including middleware
supporting reliable execution of TMOs on various platforms such as
notebook, PDA, and single-board ITX PC, associated APIs, GUI-based
design aids, and analysis tools) and application demonstrations built so
far, and remaining research issues, will be introduced.”
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