I am a faculty member in the Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

Areas of interest:

 

Activity theory proposes that consciousness is shaped by practice, that people and artifacts mediate our relationship with reality. Consciousness is produced in the enactment of activity with other people and things, rather than being something confined inside a human head. Activity theory began in Russia with the work of Lev Vygotsky in the 1920's, continuing through his student Aleksey Leontiev, and then through students of Leontiev. This work has been influential in education, organizational design, and interaction design. Activity theory works well with design because activity theorists have always tested their theories in practical ways and believe that application is an outcome of theory, not a separate activity. In some of my writings I have discussed how, as a psychological theory, activity theory can be scaled to collaborative settings without losing sight of individual participants in an activity.

Related publications

Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design, with Victor Kaptelinin, MIT Press (2006)
NetWORKers and their Activity in Intensional Networks (2002)
Co-editor, special issue of Computer-supported Cooperative Work, "Activity Theory and the Practice of Design," with David Redmiles. Volume 11(1-2) (2002)
Co-editor, special issue of Computer-supported Cooperative Work, "A Web on the Wind: The Structure of Invisible Work," with Yrjo Engeström. Volume 8 (1-2) (1998)
Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-computer Interaction, MIT Press (1996)

 

My research suggests that a good deal of communication is intended to create feelings of connection between people rather than to convey specific messages. Affinity, commitment, and attention are aspects of connection. They are active fields of connection between dyads that are constantly negotiated and monitored. These fields "decay" or grow inert without interaction. While face to face interaction is especially rich in ways to establish connection (touching, eating together, making eye contact, sharing common space, informal chitchat), people also establish connection through mediated communication. Blogs, wikis, instant messaging, email, chat, newsgroups, listservs, websites, and games are especially interesting forms of human communication that establish and maintain fields of connection as well as allow for the exchange of substantive information. My most recent research concerns massively multiplayer online games. I am conducting participant-observation fieldwork in World of Warcraft, the most popular MMOG, studying how players collaborate as well as the relationship of offline, online, and in-game activity.

Related publications

I am a black cat, letting day come and go: Multimodal conversations in a Poetry Workshop (2009)
A Hybrid Cultural Ecology: World of Warcraft in China (2008)
Learning Conversations in World of Warcraft (2007)
Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft (2006)
Beyond Bandwidth: Dimensions of Connection in Interpersonal Communication (2005)
Blogging as Social Activity, or, Would You Let 900 Million People Read Your Diary? (2004)
Why We Blog (2004)
Interaction and Outeraction: Instant Messaging in Action (2000)
Turning Away From Talking Heads: The Use of Video-As-Data in Neurosurgery (1993)

 



The computer desktop was an amazing design for its time, but does not reflect the complexity, flexibility, and sociality of human activity. Based on my research, I have developed several designs that I believe would enhance the desktop, if it were possible to take them past the prototype stage and onto actual desktops. I hope the ideas will find their way into the designs of others. Eventually we will have to reorganize the desktop to reflect the complex mix of activities users engage in and move beyond the rigidity of separate applications and files-and-folders. Activity theory will be useful in this effort as we work to characterize activity. While ingenious technologies such as blogs and wikis have improved communication, we need better ways to use digital technologies to organize multiple activities, establish meaningful contexts for different activities, and collaborate with others. A different level of design and implementation is needed to make that happen.

Related publications

Whither or whether HCI: Requirements analysis for multi-Sited, multi-user cyberinfrastructures. (co-author Ann Zimmerman) Proceedings Computer-human Interaction Conference, Montreal (2006)
Soylent and ContactMap: Tools for constructing the social workscape. (co-author Danyel Fisher). In Integrated Workscapes. M. Czerwinski and V. Kaptelinin (eds.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2006).
Collaborative, Programmable Intelligent Agents (1998)
Creating Presentation Slides: A Study of User Preferences for Task-Specific versus Generic Application Software (1996)
Finding and Reminding: File Organization from the Desktop (1995)
User Preferences for Task-specific vs. Generic Application Software (1994)
A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing. MIT Press (1993)
Gardeners and Gurus: Patterns of Cooperation Among CAD Users (1992)
An Ethnographic Study of Distributed Problem Solving in Spreadsheet Development (1990) 

 

There is a strong need to find new ways to think about the social and cultural changes that come with new technologies. I have examined some such changes with respect to the work of librarians and others discussed in Information Ecologies.Our limited ability to predict change coupled with enormous human creativity has led to a situation of instability in which systemic effects of technological change can only be responded to after the fact. In the current global economy we have efficient ways of distributing technology but ineffectual means of addressing negative consequences (such as pollution from wireless devices). New political and social forms are needed. Movements such as green design, life cycle analysis, and cradle to cradle design address some problems and can be applied to digital technologies. Social changes are more difficult to characterize and require better theorizing. One of my interests is in what I call "placeless organizations" which are distributed groups dedicated to transforming practice. In the modern context they inevitably make use of computer-mediated communication as they attempt to "co-construct," in activity theory terms, the way things are done. Examples of placeless organizations are Open Source software development projects, Doctors without Borders, the World Trade Organization, and transformations in scientific disciplines from "small science" to "big science". Understanding how placeless organizations are effective with relatively few people is a current focus of my research.

Related publications

Co-editor, special issue of Transactions on Computer-human Interaction, "Social Impacts of Technology," with Matt Jones and Elizabeth Mynatt. Volume 12 (2). 2005.
Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart, with Vicki O'Day. MIT Press, 1999

 

Bonnie Nardi
Department of Informatics
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697
Office 209 ICS-2




Copyright 2005 Bonnie Nardi - Last updated: October, 2008
University of California, Irvine - Informatics