The Yahoo! Big Thinkers India series 2009

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