Design Futures: Ways of Knowing and Judging - Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye (Nokia Research) April 29, 2009

Design Futures lecture series
sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media and the School of Information

Jofish Kaye, Cornell University and Nokia Research
Ways of Knowing and Judging

There are two problems with solving problems, once you have figured out what the problem is. The first is solving the problem. The second is finding out if you've solved it.

In this talk I discuss different ways of knowing, creating knowledge, and judging if the knowledge you have created is correct. Differences in ways of knowing become increasingly apparent in interdisciplinary situations, and particularly ones with varied stakeholders. In particular I look at the emerging subfield of experience-focused human-computer interaction, which emphasizes the rich and situated nature of human interactions with technology. I discuss a set of methods and guidelines for evaluating technologies, and for representing knowledge about the experiences that people with technologies. These include asking open-ended questions, drawing analogies to color, music and other non-linear systems, and asking people to compare their families to The Simpsons.

Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye is a Research Scientist & Ethnographer at Nokia Research in Palo Alto, where he is currently studying family communication patterns and novel cell phone interfaces. He recently completed his Ph.D in Information Science at Cornell University, where his dissertation, "The Epistemology and Evaluation of Experience-focused HCI" used notions of epistemography drawn from science & technology studies to explore evaluation in the emerging field of experience-focused HCI. He spent six months as a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and has also worked with the Domestic Design & Technology Research Group at Intel and several startups. His work has included ethnographic, cultural, critical and technological studies of, among other topics, academics' archiving practices, couples in long distance relationships, affective computing, ubiquitous computing, social networking, and smart homes and kitchens. He also has a Masters degree in Media Arts & Sciences and a B.S. in Cognitive Science, both from MIT.

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