-
Meeting 6/4/2013: Ray McCall and Janet Burge—Untangling Wicked Problems
We believe there is a need for rigorous theories of design that can serve as a basis for progress in the 21st Century across a wide range of design fields. To meet this goal, we aim to help establish a foundation for such a theory by carefully investigating the nature of design problems and determining what…
-
Proposal Defense 5/28/13: Jason Zietz — Utilizing a Socio-technical System to Foster and Support Mindfulness to Engender Persistent Pro-Environmental Behaviors
Human beings often make decisions without fully realizing the factors that influence their choices. A woman buys the same type of car that most of her neighbors drive despite it being too small for her needs. A man at a salad bar loads up on the croutons that are in the first row of items…
-
Meeting 4/3/2013: Nicholas Carr — Media and the Mind: A Conversation with Nicholas Carr
Is the Internet influencing the way we think? If so, how? Nicholas Carr, author of the Pulitzer-nominated book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains?” will join us for a discussion of the cognitive and intellectual effects of digital media. Brief Bio Nicholas Carr writes about technology, culture, and economics. His most…
-
Meeting 1/16/2013: Laura Malinin — Situating Creative Practices: The Role of the Designed Environment in Creativity
Stories abound about how creative people believe that the aspects of their settings — including the spaces they inhabit along with the tools and materials they use — are important to their creative process. Anecdotes relay how Immanuel Kant felt he needed the church steeple view from his bedroom window to be creative, Proust preferred to work in a cork-lined room, and…
-
Meeting 5/15/2012: Education for Everyone: Hype or Reality?
One of the “hottest” topics these days is based on reports (from Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Michigan, Penn) that over 100 000 students sign up for classes taught about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, etc.. This is advertised as follows (from https://www.coursera.org/): Education for Everyone. We offer courses from the top universities, for free. Learn from world-class professors,…
-
Meeting 4/25/2012: Jason Zietz (L3D) — Understanding the Impacts of Emotions and Decision-Making on Environmental Behaviors
Given the overwhelming evidence that current energy use by humans contributes to global warming, reducing our non-renewable energy consumption is a worthwhile endeavor. But in order to reduce our consumption we must first better understand it, and unfortunately the implications of our usage largely go unnoticed. This ignorance is likely rooted in the interactions most…
-
Meeting 4/11/12: Holger Dick, L3D — Motivating instead of pressuring: Using smart grid technology and cultures of participation to reduce residential energy consumption
Global energy consumption is at unsustainable levels and to reduce it, renewable energies and increased energy efficiency have to be combined with changes in behavior. Common approaches to ‘motivate’ people to use less energy are increasing energy prices or starting energy competitions between consumers. Both have repeatedly been shown to actually reduce intrinsic motivation and…
-
Meeting 4/4/12: Hal Eden, L3D — Energy Sustainability as a Challenge for Socio-Technical Systems
“The mission of L3D is to establish the scientific foundations for the envisionment, design, development, and assessment of socio-technical systems that serve as amplifiers of human capabilities and that will bring dramatic and transformative improvements in the ways people live, learn, work, and collaborate.” Our areas of application have ranged across topics including the design…
-
Gerhard Fischer, Center for Lifelong Learning & Design (L3D): Context-Aware Systems — The ‘Right’ Information, at the ‘Right’ Time, in the ‘Right’ Place, in the ‘Right’ Way, to the ‘Right’ Person
Abstract Based on the assumption that the scarce resource for many people in the world of today is not information but human attention, the challenge for future human-centered computer systems is not to provide more information “to anyone, at anytime, and from anywhere,” but to say “the ‘right’ information, at the ‘right’ time, in the…
-
Symposium: “Exploring Fundamental Transformations of Learning and Discovery in Cultures of Participation”
Exploring Fundamental Transformations of Learning and Discovery in Cultures of Participation The purpose of this symposium is to discuss our advancements within NSF grant 1028017. You can download the entire project proposal here: CDI-2010-FullProposal, as well as supplemental information on research design and the after-school program discussed in the proposal here: Additional-Info-ResearchDesign. Schedule Gerhard’s Slides Jason’s…