I am a social-cognitive scientist, but I have invested most of my career in computer and information sciences and technology. My research is on the mediation and support of human activities through interactive software systems. At the start of my career, at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, I had the good fortune to be among those who formed the interdisciplinary field of human-computer interaction, HCI. This area spans about a dozen disciplines now.

My research has focused on a series of problem areas, reflecting both my own development and the emergence of software systems and infrastructures through the past four decades. I initially worked on psycholinguistic aspects of human-computer interactions, name schemes for files and commands, and naming more generally (a transition from my graduate/post-doctoral work in the linguistics and psycholinguistics), on understanding and supporting software design as a kind of problem-solving directed at what Rittel, Simon and Reitman had theorized as ill-structured problems, and on understanding and easing the problems of new users (a critical challenge in the early 1980s) as issues in active learning and task-oriented motivation.

I left IBM Research about mid-way through my career (in 1994), and since then have focused on theorizing and designing support for collaborative awareness in complex and extended computer-mediated interactions, on educational technology to support case-based and collaborative learning, and on understanding and elaborating community-based information technology infrastructures. Throughout my career I have worked on articulating the reciprocal relationship between human-computer interaction research and a diverse theory base in psychology and sociology that it both depends upon and extends.

My current work on collaborative awareness focuses on supporting an information analysis reference task in which a team of three analysts develops hypotheses about a criminal conspiracy. Currently the focus of the research is on information artifacts teams develop and use to organize their information space (of 222 propositions linking 26 persons of interest) and to coordinate their problem-solving. A recent result in this line of work was that cognitive specialization among team members appears to be a more effective collaborative resource than “mere” equity in participation; contradicting, or at least elaborating the main claim of the emerging collective intelligence movement. This work was supported by ONR for more than a decade, and is now supported by NSF.