Started in 2007, this is a series of quar­terly lec­tures this year on sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy and the inter­net in India. The lec­tures, under the ban­ner of the Yahoo! Big Thinkers India series, bring together acad­e­mia, sci­en­tists, the cor­po­rate world and the media.

The speak­ers are acclaimed experts from the Yahoo! Inter­na­tional team. They bring with them the exper­tise and global per­spec­tive of the con­stantly chang­ing world of tech­nol­ogy, online prod­ucts & com­mu­ni­ties and the inter­net space in general.

This time the topic is:

Sociotech­ni­cal Design and Engi­neer­ing: Putting Peo­ple First

The speaker is Eliz­a­beth F Churchill, a Prin­ci­pal Research Sci­en­tist at Yahoo! Research, where she man­ages the research area of Inter­net Expe­ri­ences. A psy­chol­o­gist by train­ing, for the past 15 years she has drawn on diverse areas to con­sider how to design effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion sit­u­a­tions both face to face and tech­no­log­i­cally medi­ated. Appli­ca­tions devel­oped and/or eval­u­ated include cell phone inter­faces, tex­tual and 3d graph­i­cal envi­ron­ments, inter­ac­tive dig­i­tal poster­boards and ani­mated inter­face personas.

Abstract: Sociotech­ni­cal design is con­cerned with under­stand­ing how users and tech­nolo­gies shape each other. When study­ing how peo­ple use sys­tems and appli­ca­tions, it is often pos­si­ble to see incon­sis­ten­cies between antic­i­pated use and actual use in every­day life. By tak­ing a social and human activity-centered per­spec­tive, we can tease out where expec­ta­tion and prac­tice con­verge and diverge — allow­ing us to iden­tify oppor­tu­ni­ties for inno­va­tion, and to design more use­ful appli­ca­tions and ser­vices. In this talk Churchill explores these top­ics through case stud­ies of sev­eral inter­net applications.

More details are here…

If you find the topic of inter­est, you can reg­is­ter your­self for the event.

Date/Time:
Fri­day, Sep 11, 2009
Time: 3:00–5:00pm
Grand Ball­room, The Leela, Bangalore