Picture of Tom Erickson



Research areas; book; selected papers; archives.


Online
Collaboration

Babble social visualization


I believe that the ability of people to have convivial and productive online interaction is limited by a lack of the cues about those with whom we're interacting. This line of research explores the idea that providing very simple cues can support online conversations that approach the grace and coherence that is natural in face to face interaction.

This work involved designing and studying the use of simple shared visualizations called social proxies that provide participants with a sense of who and how many are present, whether and how they are interacting, and so forth. I've designed visualizations for synchronous and asynchonrous online settings such as chat rooms, online meetings, text-based fora, auctions, queues and other forms of group interaction. You can get a short overview here, or an in depth treatment here.


Cities, Crowds, and
Sustainable Design

Downtown Chicago reflection


The majority of the world's population now lives in cities, and this shift shows no signs of slowing. Both the pressures of continued immigration and the cumulative effects of unsustainable water, energy, and waste management policies create a vital need to address urban problems.

My work at IBM centered on "Smarter Cities." But whereas IBM's approach has to do with using sensors to gather information that allows urban systems to be analyzed and optimized, I'm interested in how to tap the local knowledge and expertise of urban inhabitants, and how to design systems that aid societies in shifting their collective behaviors – what I call "crowdshifting."

For a taste of this work, you can read a short essay on smart parking meters, or an academic paper on a city-scale project on using smart meters to give residents feedback on their resource use.


Personal
Information
Management

Tall pile of papers on edge of desk

My earliest work in HCI – carried out mostly at Apple – was focused on personal information management. I'm interested in how people create personal systems – piles, files, annotations, etc. – to support their own knowledge work, and how technology might support those personal systems.

I've recently had the humbling experience of re-reading some of my early papers. One from 1991 predicted that one day it would be possible for ordinary people to access as many as 10,000 databases via the internet, and was quite concerned with the difficulty of query languages. On the other hand, I think my 1996 paper on "social hypertext" was pretty much on the mark regarding the social nature of onine activity, although unfortunately I overlooked the rise of online advertising which drastically altered the social ecology of the web. A recap of this line of work can be found in my slideshare presentation on Personal Information Ecologies.


Methods,
Frameworks,
and Theory

Ray of light shining thru Oculus in Pantheon


My chief interest is what is going on in the 'real world,' but to come to grips with that a variety of conceptual tools are needed. Among my longest running interests in this area is the concept of pattern languages – see my Lingua Francas paper. For over a decade I maintained a directory of work on patterns in HCI, although it is no longer current. I also have had a long term interest in the use of stories as a design tool – see this essay on storytelling – as well as scenarios and prototyping.

Although my work on Social Translucence has begun attracting attention a decade after its publication, I am ambivalent about the role of theory. I believe our field is too young for a grand overarching theory, but that more limited meso- frameworks and theories can be helpful as ways of enabling the discipline to take coherent approaches to particular problems and disciplines. I make this case in my essay Five Lenses for Interaction Design, and a bit more humorously in my poem, Theory Theory.


HCI Remixed

HCI Remixed cover picture


This is a book of essays I edited with David McDonald in 2005 - 06. Each author was asked to reflect on a book or paper -- at least a decade old -- that had influenced their work in HCI. Works that authors choose ranged from well-known classics to obscure papers that had received little notice when published, to works that at first glance seemed very distant from the field. The book was a delight to edit, and it still reads well, today, IMHO.

The official blurb: Over almost three decades, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has produced a rich and varied literature. Although the focus of attention today is naturally on new work, older contributions that played a role in shaping the trajectory and character of the field have much to tell us. The contributors to HCI Remixed were asked to reflect on a single work at least ten years old that influenced their approach to HCI. The result is this collection of fifty-one short, engaging, and idiosyncratic essays, reflections on a range of works in a variety of forms that chart the emergence of a new field.

For more informationsee Amazon or MIT Press


Selected
Papers

Niemanstverdreit, and Erickson, T. Recurring Meetings: An Experiential Account of Repeating Meetings in a Large Organization.Proc. of the ACM on CSCW, November 2017.

Xu, Bin., Ellis, J., and Erickson, T. Attention from Afar: Simulating the Gazes of Remote Participants in Hybrid Meetings. Proc. DIS 2017, June 2017.

Erickson, T. Creating Kairos. Interactions, XXII.4, July/August 2015.

Erickson, T., Li, M., Kim, Y., Deshpande, A., Sahu, S., Chao, T., Sukaviriya, P. and Naphade. The Dubuque Electricity Portal: Evaluation of a City-Scale Residential Electricity Consumption Feedback System. Proc. CHI 2013. ACM Press, 2013. Best paper award and Computational Sustainability award.

Erickson, T. Empathy or Efficiency: A Tale of Two Parking Meters. asmarterplanet.com [IBM's A Smarter Planet Blog]. August 3, 2012.

Erickson, T., Shami, N.S., Kellogg, W.A. and Levine, D.W. Synchronous Interaction Among Hundreds: An Evaluation of a Conference in an Avatar-based Virtual EnvironmentProc. CHI 2011. ACM Press, 2011. Best Paper Award.

Panciera, K., Priedhorsky, R., Erickson, T., and Terveen, L. Lurking? Cyclopaths? A Quantitative Lifecycle: Analysis of User Behavior in a Geowiki. Proc. CHI 2010. ACM Press, 2010. Best Paper Nominee.

Erickson, T. ‘Social’ Systems: Designing Digital Systems that Support Social Intelligence. AI and Society, 23:2, 147-166, 2009.

Erickson, T., Danis, C., Kellogg W. A., and Helander, M. E. Assistance: The Work Practices of Human Administrative Assistants and their Implications for IT and Organizations. The Proceedings of CSCW 2008. New York: ACM Press, 2008. Best Paper Award.

Ding, X., Erickson, T., Kellogg, W.A., Levy, S., Christensen, J.E., Sussman, J., Wolf, T.V. and Bennett, W.E. An Empirical Study of the Use of Visually Enhanced VoIP Audio Conferencing: The Case of IEAC. The Proceedings of CHI 2007. New York: ACM Press, 2007.

Erickson, T. ‘Social’ Systems: Designing Digital Systems that Support Social Intelligence. AI and Society, 23:2 147-166, 2009.

Erickson, T., Kellogg, W. A., Laff, M., Sussman, J. Wolf, T. V., Halverson, C. A., Edwards, D. A. A Persistent Chat Space for Work Groups: The Design, Evaluation and Deployment of Loops. The Proceedings of DIS 2006. New York: ACM Press, 2006.

Weisz, J. D., Erickson, T., and Kellogg, W.A. Broadcast Synchronous Messaging: The Use of ICT. Proc. CHI 2006. ACM Press: April, 2006. Nominated for a best paper award.

Erickson, T. Five Lenses: Towards a Toolkit for Interaction Design Theories and Practice in Interaction Design (ed. S. Bagnara, G. Crampton-Smith, G. and Salvendy.) Lawrence Erlbaum: April, 2006.

Erickson, T. and Kellogg, W.A. Social Proxy. The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction. Berkshire Publishing Group, LLC, 2004.

Erickson, T. Designing Visualizations of Social Activity: Six Claims The Proceedings of CHI 2003: Extended Abstracts, pp 846-847. New York: ACM Press, 2003.

Erickson, T. and Laff, M. The Design of the 'Babble' Timeline: A Social Proxy for Visualizing Group Activity over Time. In Human Factors in Computing Systems: The Proceedings of CHI 2001. ACM Press, 2001.

Erickson, T. Lingua Francas for Design: Sacred Places and Pattern Languages. In The Proceedings of DIS 2000 (Brooklyn, NY, August 17-19, 2000). New York: ACM Press, 2000, pp 357-368.

Erickson, T. & Kellogg, W. Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Mesh with Social Processes. In Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Vol. 7, No. 1, pp 59-83. New York: ACM Press, 2000.

Erickson, T. Smith, D. N., Kellogg, W. A., Laff, M. R., Richards, J. T., and Bradner, E. Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of 'Babble.' In Human Factors in Computing Systems: The Proceedings of CHI '99. ACM Press, 1999.

Erickson, Thomas. Rhyme and Punishment: The Creation and Enforcement of Conventions in an On-Line Participatory Limerick Genre. In the Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science. (ed. J. F. Nunamaker, Jr. R. H. Sprague, Jr.), January, 1999.

Archives

Persistent Conversation was a minitrack at the HICSS (Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science) that I co-chaired with Susan Herring from 1999 to 2010. It's aim was to explore, track, and understand what it meant for people to carry on textual conversations through digital media. Over the decade plus it was in existence, over 89 papers were published by authors from a wide variety of disciplines. Here is a list of authors and papers; the links to the papers are probably mostly dead as IEEE has changed their site...

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This AHA(Apple Human Interface Alumni) page was created to track the disapora of HCI folks following the elimination of Apple Research in 1997. I maintained the page until 2014. It's interesting to see where alumni of Apple HCI went.

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Pattern Languages. Around 1995 I became interested in how pattern languages, as developed by the architect Christopher Alexander, might serve as a lingua franca for interdisciplinary design in HCI. As part of this project, I began tracking papers on the topic... this continued until 2012.




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