Talk WHAT: Yvonne Rogers (Indiana University): "Congeries of Minds, Bodies, and Technologies" WHEN: Monday, March 28, 2005; 4:00 PM EST WHERE: Bartos Theatre, MIT Media Lab (E15) HOST: Mitchel Resnick LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research SUMMARY: Mark Weiser's vision of calm technology, first presented in the early 90s, has had a major impact on research and development in computing and design. At the heart of his vision was the idea that computing systems should operate quietly, invisibly, and intelligently in the background, making our everyday and working lives comfortable, effortless, and encalming. Subsequent paradigms include ambient intelligence, the disappearing computer, and pervasive computing. Thus, the focus is now shifting from "the user" to "the environment:" determining how to design homes, workplaces, and public spaces to be more context aware. But such approaches downplay one of the main benefits of computational technologies, namely, to empower people by allowing them to reason and solve problems in creative ways. The new generation of ubiquitous computing technologies (including sensing, mobile, wireless, and display) provides opportunities to design user-sensitive experiences that enable people to learn and work together across interconnected digital and physical worlds. In her talk, Rogers will describe how she has begun to develop cognitive ecologies, where people interact with the physical world, with digital representations of the world, and with each other in novel ways. Instead of trying to create essentially passive and pacific pervasive environments, her goal is to fashion congeries of minds, bodies, and technologies that challenge people to think, analyze, learn, and reason proactively about aspects of the world. BIO: Yvonne Rogers is a professor of informatics and information science at Indiana University. She is also an adjunct professor of cognitive science. Prior to moving to the United States, she was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the former School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (now the Department of Informatics) at Sussex University, UK, where she co-founded the Interact Lab, an internationally known interdisciplinary research center concerned with possible interactions between people, technologies, and representations. She has also been an assistant professor at the Open University (UK), a senior researcher at Alcatel telecommunications company, a visiting scholar at UCSD, and a visiting professor at Stanford University, Apple Research Labs, and the University of Queensland. She is best known for her work in human-computer interaction, interaction design, computer supported cooperative work, and interactive learning environments. Her research focuses on augmenting and extending everyday, learning and work activities with interactive technologies that move beyond the desktop. This involves designing enhanced user experiences through appropriating and assembling a diversity of technologies including mobile, wireless, handheld, and pervasive computing. A main focus is not the technology per se but the design and integration of the digital representations that are presented via them to support social and cognitive activities in ways that extend our current capabilities. MIT Media Laboratory Home Page | Events Main Index