IU researchers to collaborate about social technology questions

An IU School of Informatics and Computing research group received more than $1.85 million to create the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing.

“This new research center is quite an extraordinary effort,” informatics professor Erik A. Stolterman said.

Informatics professors Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell and Stolterman will collaborate with researchers at Cornell University and New York University.

It will be an interdisciplinary collaboration that will focus on five interplaying themes: the materiality of information, algorithmic living, information ecosystems, subjectives of information and creativity and collectivity.

“The five research themes were all developed with the view that social and technical phenomena are deeply and complexly linked,” Bardzell said in a press release.

“Instead of beginning with technical innovations and finding uses for them, which is the traditional computer science approach, and instead of starting with well-defined user needs and developing technologies to support them, the traditional user-centered design approach, these five themes recognize and embrace the complex relationships between technological development and adoption on the one hand and large-scale, socio-cultural phenomena on the other.”

— Nona Tepper