Michael Muller will be the keynote speaker for SIGDOC 2007. Dr. Muller is an internationally recognized expert in participatory design, having co-developed participatory practices such as PICTIVE, CARD and Participatory Heuristic Evaluation. Dr. Muller works as a research scientist and design researcher in the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research in Cambridge MA. His current research explores how people make use of social software, especially social-tagging services within enterprises. His previous work focused on human-to-human coordination and collaboration in complex work activities. In professional communities, he has helped to open questions of democratic practices for analysis, design, and evaluation of information systems, and spiritual experiences with information technologies.
Dr. Muller has a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Rutgers University. He has worked in research and practice in usability, user-centered design, and work analysis at Microsoft, U.S. West Advanced Technologies, and Bellcore.
Abstract: Collaborative Activity Management: Organizing Documents for Collective Action
Workplace collaborators make use of diverse types of documents and other resources. Traditionally, each type of document has been stored in its own repository, and people have had to manage multiple documents in multiple storage services. Workplace collaborators often have complex, ad hoc working relations that are partially executed through their shared documents. Traditionally, dependencies among documents and other objects have gone unrecorded, or have been stored in a piecemeal manner inside the documents, or have been objectified and rigidified in workflow engines. Workplace collaborators often need to coordinate with one another, both asynchronously and in real-time, and often in the context of their shared documents. Traditionally, people had no idea of the status of their collaborators, or they have had to consult other, unrelated services for awareness or presence information about their colleagues. We aim to change that. I will describe our research, findings, and possible futures of systems and services that are intended to unify the ways that people collaborate with and through shared documents.
SIGDOC Diana Award: Laboratory for Usability Testing and Evaluation, University of Washington, to be accepted by Judith Ramey
Judith Ramey will accept SIGDOC’s Diana Award on behalf of The University of Washington's Laboratory for Usability Testing and Evaluation (LUTE). Every two years SIGDOC presents the Diana Award to an organization, institution or business for its long-term contribution to the field of communication design. This year, the Diana Award is presented to LUTE in recognition of the balancing of its research, educational, and corporate partnership missions, its publication history, and its history of producing graduate-level TC research as well as faculty research.
