The following research group descriptions are archived because they are no longer offered, the faculty member is on sabbatical, or the group is taking a break. Please contact the faculty member or an advisor to learn more about these groups.
- Reading Group for Sensemaking in Organizations
- The Production of Astronomical Knowledge in the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)
- Creative Reflections on Working During Covid Times
- Cooperatives and Sociotechnical Design
- The Collaborative Marine Atlas Project (CMAP): Evaluating a Data Portal for Ocean Science
- Reading Group on Data-Centric Approaches and the Changing Practices and Cultures of Science
- Creepy technology
- Developing a trajectory for collaborative cyberinfrastructure for ocean science
- Comics Made By You
- Developing the Model of Coordinated Action (MoCA)
- Comics Made By You: Reflecting on Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” 71 Years Later
- Dealing with People Coming and Going: Turnover in Coordinated Action
- Comics Made By You: Human Centered Design & Engineering for Everyone
- Conducting a User Study of Farmer's Markets
- Designing a User Study of Farmer's Markets: What do Growers and Eaters Want?
- Creating a Resource to Map the HCDE Design Theory Landscape
- Reading Group on Scientific Cyberinfrastructures and Emergent Systems
- Investigating the Role of Online Calendar Use in the Cultivation and Maintenance of Relationships
- Scientific Cyberinfrastructures and e-Research: Surveying the Literature
- Computer Supported Collaboration
Autumn 2023
Reading Group for Sensemaking in Organizations
Directed by Charlotte P. Lee, Professor, HCDE
For this DRG we will be reading and discussing one book: Karl Weick's landmark book "Sensemaking in Organizations". Weick is a famous organizational theorist who took and takes an approach that is different from most organizational theorists. Rather than focusing on rational decision making, Weick focuses on how a process of ongoing sensemaking shapes what people do and how they do it in organizations. This work is more important than ever as we strive to understand the limits and opportunities of automation for a world increasingly dependent on AI/ML technologies.
In this DRG we will divide up the book to read one or two chapters per week culminating during week 10. Participants are expected to attend meetings and participate actively. In addition to the readings, participants will be encouraged to occasionally bring in related research papers, media articles, or examples from pop culture (e.g. films, video games) for "show and tell" during the course of the quarter. At the end of the quarter students will turn in a 2-page reflection paper.
The DRG will be for 1-3 units and will take place via Zoom on Monday at 3:30pm. PhD student schedules will be accommodated first, followed by MS students, followed by BS students. This DRG is at capacity for Autumn 2023 and no longer accepting applications.
The Production of Astronomical Knowledge in the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)
We are seeking a small group of 2-4 doctoral, masters and/or undergraduate students interested in studying the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
The Rubin Observatory in Chile is slated to come online next year and begin the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a wide angle, decade-long survey of the southern night sky. The LSST will leverage the largest digital camera ever created to produce what has been described as a 10-year long high definition video of the cosmos. This will give scientists the ability to track changes and movement over time, and in turn ask fundamental questions about the past and future of our solar system, the composition of the universe, and much more. The telescope will produce data of unprecedented size and speed, churning out 20 terabytes of raw data nightly and hundreds of petabytes of processed data over the course of the decade. Data releases will be made available broadly within the astronomy community at regular intervals, some nightly and some annually.
The scale, immediacy, and openness of LSST data will ostensibly obviate many of the tradeoffs that characterized the preceding era of optical astronomy by sidestepping competition for access and observing time at scarce facilities. As such, LSST has the potential to democratize the field of astronomy by dramatically increasing access to astronomical data. At the same time, LSST data can only be made useful through the collaborative development and use of novel computational tools and techniques capable of handling the volume and velocity of data produced by the Rubin telescope. As such, the LSST has been imagined and structured as a convergent endeavor involving coordination and sense-making among astrophysicists, data scientists, and software engineers.
This DRG will be jointly led by Dr. Anissa Tanweer, Research Scientist at the eScience Institute and Will Sutherland, PhD Candidate in HCDE, with supervision and guidance from Dr. Charlotte Lee of HCDE. Our own goal in this project is to better understand the negotiation of access in this new model of big data astronomy exemplified by the LSST.
Students in this DRG will be part of exploratory research that will kick off longer-term ethnographic inquiry into the LSST project and the communities that support it. Some of the broad questions that may be of interest include:
- What does the role of software in analyzing LSST mean for who gets included in the production of astronomical knowledge?
- How does LSST membership, access to LSST data, and access to software tools mediate the production of scientific knowledge across various kinds of teams, experts, and institutions?
- How does the availability of LSST data open up new directions of inquiry in astronomy, and what are the implications for how the field—and society more broadly—come to understand the universe?
We anticipate that students will benefit from the following opportunities in this DRG:
- Development of qualitative ethnographic research skills, including interviews, field observations, and/or documentary analysis
- Exposure to theories about the organization of knowledge production
- Window into the making of cutting-edge scientific research
- Contribution to the early stages of planning for long term ethnographic research with the chance to influence the trajectory of that work
- Possibility of longer-term collaborations
Winter 2022
Creative Reflections on Working During Covid Times
Directed by Charlotte P. Lee, Associate Professor
This studio-format DRG is meant to get your creative juices flowing by reflecting on being a human being trying to work during the Covid pandemic. By reflecting on the particulars of the emotional, practical, or social ease or difficulty of what we are doing during Covid, we learn about work, ourselves, and each other. Each week we will decide on a topic and a medium (e.g. “loss” and a photograph, or “masks” and haikus, “family” and a crayon drawing). No topic of medium will be mandatory but I asks students to try hard to stick with the program since what makes this special is the shared experience. Each meeting will begin with us sharing what we’ve made and then end with choice of the next prompt and medium. Your work does not need to be “good” it just needs to exist.
During week 10 we will each choose our favorite three products that we are willing to share and make our creative works (or digital versions of them) available to the public online.
This 1-credit CR/NC DRG will meet once a week starting week 3. We will meet via Zoom for most meetings. We may meet in-person at the end of quarter if there is a majority interest in doing so.
Spring 2021
Cooperatives and Sociotechnical Design
Directed by Scott Mainwaring, Affiliate Assistant Professor, HCDE
Co-Directed by Charlotte P. Lee, Associate Professor, HCDE
How can we design and develop technologies that foreground critical concerns of social justice and inclusion? There are no simple answers. One path forward is to take inspiration from the idea of cooperatives and cooperative principles. What traditions and histories can we draw upon for inspiration–and as cautionary tales? In this DRG, we will focus on cooperatives and cooperative principles, both inside and outside of technology domains. We will discuss what we find along the way and produce an annotated bibliography to help technology students and professionals learn about designing for (re)distribution of power, wealth, and knowledge. This is a large topic, with few scalable success stories, more than a few controversies and failures, but nevertheless powerful underlying ideas that have persisted since (at least) the 19th century.
Cooperatives present an alternative to existing structures of capitalist exploitation and hierarchy, based on mutual aid and joint ownership. Cooperativism is a set of theories and principles (see the Seven Cooperative Principles) embodied to greater and lesser degrees in a wide range of practices, platforms, and companies, including:
Movements such as participatory design, citizen science, and platform cooperativism
Financial cooperatives such as credit unions, savings banks, and informal ROSCAs
Peer-production technology platforms like blockchain and wikis
Co-op businesses, member-owned (e.g., REI and PCC), worker-owned (e.g., WinCo Foods, Spain’s Mondragon), or citizen-owned (e.g., rural electric cooperatives and public utility districts)
This DRG will conduct exploratory research, to identify key concepts, questions, readings, and examples, as a 2-3 credit, active reading and discussion group, focused on key questions for HCDE researchers and designers. Each week students will read and write reflections on a primary reading, with one student taking the lead in presenting the reading, leading discussion, and drafting an annotation for bibliography deliverable. Secondary readings and examples will be explored throughout the quarter as well. For additional credit, students can produce materials to accompany the jointly produced annotated bibliography.
The Collaborative Marine Atlas Project (CMAP): Evaluating a Data Portal for Ocean Science
Led by PhD students Andy Neang and Will Sutherland and Associate Professor Charlotte Lee
Data portals and repositories are increasingly becoming a central tool in the field of oceanography. As oceanographers increasingly share and integrate datasets from different labs (and across disciplines), such repositories become important sites of collaborative work and interdisciplinary encounters.
In this DRG we will engage a data exploration tool in the early stages of its development, and attempt to evaluate how it might facilitate early-career oceanographers in finding and making sense of unfamiliar data sets. We will conduct user studies with oceanography students and researchers with the purpose of making recommendations to the tool’s design team. We will also explore how this tool might facilitate data sharing in a large, interdisciplinary collaboration, and explore the assumptions and implications that tools like this carry with them.
Through this DRG you will gain experience with the following:
Conducting user studies
Evaluating data and developing a report for designers
Light background reading on collaborative tools and data-centric science
Knowledge of oceanography is not required!
This DRG will tentatively meet on Thursdays, from 1:30-3:30pm or Fridays, from 1:30-3:30pm. Participants can sign up for 2-3 credits.
Questions? Please contact:
Andy Neang (neanga@uw.edu), PhD Student
Will Sutherland (willsk88@uw.edu), PhD Student
Prof. Charlotte Lee (cplee@uw.edu), HCDE Faculty
Reading Group on Data-Centric Approaches and the Changing Practices and Cultures of Science
Co-directed by Will Sutherland, PhD Student and Charlotte P. Lee, Associate Professor
We will be reading Sabina Leonelli’s excellent book on Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study. Science and its relation to data is co-evolving with the proliferation and increasing convergence of digital technologies. Those of us who are interested in helping develop information infrastructures, for science and for other areas of endeavor, are faced not only with changing practices and technologies “on the ground” but also a larger cultural shift taking place in organizations and institutions. This book will help us to think about new data and technology practices in the context of changing organizations and institutions. While the book focuses on biology and life sciences, many of the concerns and issues presented are applicable to a wide variety of information infrastructures.
The book addresses key concerns: what now counts as data; existing conceptions of the role and use of evidence in the life sciences and elsewhere; what counts as scientific knowledge at a time of significant technological and institutional change; how this relates to the social worlds within which data are produced, circulated, and used; and under which conditions large datasets can and should be organized and interpreted in order to generate knowledge.
This is a 1 credit DRG. We will read 1 chapter per week. Each chapter is about 20-25 pages. The book has many rich ideas but is also very readable. Students are welcome to bring in additional relevant readings to the group.
The approximate schedule is as follows:
Weeks 1: Introduction
Week 2-8: Discuss each chapter, one at a time. One designated person will summarize. Everyone brings 2 questions for discussion.
Weeks 9: Discussion
Weeks 10: Write a 1-page reflection to share.
Winter 2019
Co-directed by Scott Mainwaring, Affiliate Assistant Professor; Charlotte Lee, Associate Professor
With the rise of infrastructures of surveillance capitalism, increasingly intimate personal technologies, security breaches and risks, and technological impersonations, a range of user experiences have been or are being termed "creepy". But what is creepiness, and what distinct varieties of creepy technologies and experiences are there?
In this DRG we will explore and critique theories of creepiness and relevant empirical data, and collect and analyze creepy technologies and technological experiences. We will survey the relevant literature with in HCI, but also draw in work from the social sciences and humanities. We will also bring in examples and stories of technocreepiness for discussion and analysis. The goal is both to arrive at a better understanding of this loaded term, and to inspire and ground follow-on research and writing by DRG participants. DRG participants will lead discussions on readings and on examples they will bring in for show-and-tell.
Developing a trajectory for collaborative cyberinfrastructure for ocean science
Autumn 2018
Co-directed by Andy Neang, PhD student; Michael Beach, PhD student; Charlotte Lee, Associate Professor
How do ocean science researchers collaborate with each other today? How do they want to be able to collaborate next year? Or in ten years? How can we support the design of increasingly complex, long-term, and multidisciplinary collaborations? How do we design information systems and tools that work for current practice while also enabling breakthroughs previously thought unattainable?
This directed research group will help develop a trajectory for an oceanographic cyberinfrastructure project that supports emergent scientific collaborations. During the first few weeks, we will dive deep into a rich ethnographic dataset that our lab has been collecting from the field in order to become familiar with the design/research space. Using design sprint methodologies to guide collaboration, we will create memos, identify key findings, and map out the connections between a multi-disciplinary group of investigators from oceanography, statistics, data science, ecology, biogeochemistry and remote sensing, and the flow of data. Mid-quarter we will synthesize what we have created and develop visualizations to present to the science community that we are designing for. The final weeks of the quarter will be used for reflective writings.
The approximate schedule for the focus of each week is as follows:
- Weeks 1–3: Get familiar with the dataset. Create annotation, memos, key findings in a collaborative way.
- Weeks 4–8: Synthesize what we've created. Create maps, visualizations, and other presentation materials.
- Weeks 9–10: Reflection
Our research group is looking for four to six highly motivated group members to join us for Autumn 2018 quarter. BS, MS, and PhD students are all welcome. Participants in this research group will enroll for 3–4 credits (CR/NC) unless with special permission from the instructor through HCDE 596 (for graduate students) or HCDE 496 (for undergraduate students). We will meet for 90 minutes once per week. Meeting time is TBD and will scheduled for convenience of all participants.
Autumn 2017
Prof. Charlotte Lee with Jeremy Kayes
Meeting times: Wednesday or Thursday Evenings (TBD)
Comics can be a form of user experience design, of storyboarding and of technical communication. They can serve to convey complex ideas, concepts, and emotions in an accessible and sometimes profound way giving us the power to explore and tell stories.
This is the fourth iteration of this DRG. In 2014, we drew comics describing and defining different aspects of Human Centered Design and Engineering. In 2015, we used comics to explore and explain the concept of the sociotechnical - what it means and why we study it. Last year we drew our inspiration from Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article “As We May Think” that envisions, and in some cases predicts, the future of computing. Using that article as a touchstone, we explored the themes of inspiration, time and memory. This year’s theme is TBD
The goal of this directed research group is for participants to create and ultimately publish a collection of comics related to the history and/or future of human centered design and computing. You do not need to be able to draw. If you can draw a stick figure, you can draw a comic. Depending on how fast you work, 3 to 4 complete pages is a realistic goal for the quarter. Please note that deliverables are due weekly in order to meet our production deadline. This class is fun but it also provides steady work.
This DRG will be co-taught by Jeremy Kayes, author of the book The Indies and founder and organizer of the 5-year-old, 800 member, Seattle Indie Comic and Game Artist (SICAGA) Meetup group. Jeremy has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University and works as a User Interface Developer.
Students will be responsible for buying their own art supplies and for getting access to Adobe Photoshop through UW resources, such as Odegaard Learning Commons, or by purchasing a license. We will discuss art supplies during the first class.
BS, MS, and PhD students are all welcome. Students will enroll for 3 or more credits (CR/NC) through HCDE 596 (for graduate students) or HCDE 496 (for undergraduate students).
Developing the Model of Coordinated Action (MoCA)
Winter 2017
Andrew Neang, PhD Student
Prof. Charlotte P. Lee
As computerized technologies and the practices they support continue to grow in diversity, ubiquity, complexity, and scale, the number and type of research topics related to the study of collaborative systems simultaneously continue to proliferate. It has become increasingly urgent to find ways to describe the problem space of practitioners and researchers in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). If we are designing to support coordinated action we should know more about what coordinated action is and have better ways to talk about the variations among them.
In this DRG, students will be introduced to the Model of Coordinated Action or MoCA (Lee & Paine, 2015) and help the team further develop ordinal measures for the seven dimensions of this conceptual framework. This work contributes to Prof. Lee’s on-going efforts to further develop the overall theoretical framework and to build bridges between the framework and providing design guidance. As a group, we will conduct a retrospective content analysis of CSCW publications from over the past decade. Students will also work on identifying and presenting relevant literature for group discussion to help advance select dimensions of MoCA.
To get some background and details about the project, check out the HCDE Seminar Series talks here: http://www.hcde.washington.edu/seminar-series/lee
Our research group is looking for up to to 2 responsible and highly motivated individuals to join us for Winter 2017. In this project, successful students have generally had an interest in collaboration and organizations, a general interest in theoretical ideas and concepts, and are self-motivated. BS, MS, and PhD students are all welcome. However, given limited space we will be interviewing applicants. Students will enroll for 2-3 credits (CR/NC) unless with special permission from the instructor through HCDE 596 (for graduate students) or HCDE 496 (for undergraduate students). This research group will meet once per week during the winter quarter for 1 hour and there will be one all-meeting that might be held on a weekend. Time and date is TBD. Students interested in this research group should contact Andrew Neang (neanga@uw.edu) with a statement about their interests and relevant background and/or qualifications.
Paper on Model of Coordinated Action (MoCA)
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Pre-print: https://depts.washington.edu/csclab/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/CSCW2015_MoCA_preprint.pdf
Comics Made By You: Reflecting on Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” 71 Years Later
Autumn 2016
420 Sieg Hall
This is the third iteration of this DRG. In 2014, we drew comics describing and defining different aspects of Human Centered Design and Engineering. In 2015, we used comics to explore and explain the concept of the sociotechnical - what it means and why we study it. This year, we will draw our inspiration from Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article “As We May Think” that envisions, and in some cases predicts, the future of computing. Using that article as a touchstone, we will explore what it means to look forward, both then and now.
The goal of this directed research group is for participants to create and ultimately publish a collection of comics about the history and/or future of human centered design and computing. You do not need to be able to draw. If you can draw a stick figure, you can draw a comic. Depending on how fast you work and how many units you sign up for, 3 to 4 complete pages is a realistic goal for the quarter.
This DRG will be co-taught by Jeremy Kayes, author of the book The Indies and founder and organizer of the 5-year-old, 800 member, Seattle Indie Comic and Game Artist (SICAGA) Meetup group. Jeremy has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University and works as a User Interface Developer.
Students will be responsible for buying their own art supplies and for getting access to Adobe Photoshop through UW resources, such as Odegaard Learning Commons, or by purchasing a license. We will discuss art supplies during the first class.
BS, MS, and PhD students are all welcome, but we are limiting participation to 10 students. Students will enroll for 2-3 credits (CR/NC) through HCDE 596 (for graduate students) or HCDE 496 (for undergraduate students).
Dealing with People Coming and Going: Turnover in Coordinated Action
Autumn 2016
Thursdays, 2 p.m. or 2:30 p.m.
425 Sieg Hall
We are looking for students for Fall 2016 to participate in a reading group/workshop that will help develop a part of a conceptual framework for the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), the Model of Coordinated Action or MoCA (Lee & Paine, 2015).
We will focus on one of the seven dimensions of MoCA: turnover. Turnover characterizes the rapidity and ease with which people enter and leave and leave a collaboration. Collaborations with low turnover may be characterized by stability, closed boundaries, and perhaps formally defined participant roles (e.g. student project groups). Situations of high turnover are found in more emergent collaborations characterized by mass participation, porous boundaries, and tolerance for rapidly changing membership (e.g. crowdsourced disaster response).
Turnover is an under-researched area. We will look at turnover as it has been analyzed in CSCW, HCI, and other fields such as organization studies, sociology, human resource management, churn prediction, and software development. We will also looked at related concepts such as barriers to entry, churn monitoring and prediction, turnover consequences, ethical leadership, change management, and emergent organizations.
The first part of the the DRG will involve a reading group and the second part of the course will involve students identifying and presenting relevant primary (e.g. informal interviews) or secondary materials (e.g. newspaper or journal articles) for group discussion. At the conclusion of the class we will synthesize our findings.
Paper on Model of Coordinated Action (MoCA) can be accessed these two ways: