Congratulations to the research group at Indiana University Bloomington’s School of Informatics and Computing upon receiving over $1.85 million to create the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. The award was announced June 26 by Intel Labs as part of a $12 million research center composed of faculty from IU and four other universities. Three researchers from the IU School of Informatics will collaborate with other researchers from University California Irvine, Cornell University, Georgia Tech and New York University in an exploration of information technology and digital media as social and cultural phenomena.
The work of the center is organized around five overlapping and interlocking themes:
- The Materiality of Information: Re-thinking the nature of information as grounded in materials and physical objects.
- Algorithmic Living: Implications of algorithms moving into social systems and daily life, invited or not.
- Information Ecosystems: How people, values and systems interact and conflict at different scales.
- Subjectivities of Information: Moving beyond “the user” as the center of user experience and user-centered design.
- Creativity and Collectivity: How group production and patterns of making are changing what it is to be creative.
The three IU professors are specialists in the field of human-computer interaction design, an area of work that studies and supports the design, development and implementation of humanly usable and socially acceptable interactive devices, applications, services and systems.