Tom Erickson

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Tom Erickson's Picture

The face that crashed a Japanese face recognition system (it assumed that hair lines are located over the eyes -- those cultural assumptions will get you every time!)


Amusements

What made Wells a true visionary was not so much his ability to predict so many of the technological marvels of the late twentieth century, but his prescience in setting them in a world where men were still wearing neckties. --Geoffroy Nunberg

Sorry. I don't understand the word sorry. --Computer error message.

Press Enter to Exit. --Computer 'help' message

Plans are worthless, planning is invaluable. --Dwight Eisenhower

Q: So, has success changed you?
A: Yeah, it's changed me. You know how when you're eating pistachios and you find one that's hard to get the shell open? Well, I don't bother with them anymore. --Bob Weir

Team building comes from the exchange of code. Team building comes from the exchange of code. When my code calls your code, we are a team. Before that, no team!
--Apratim Purakayasth


A few essays

You may be amused by part 2 of the story of my trip to Maui (The Key), or interested by my description of an area of Yoesemite that is recovering from a fire (After the Fire).

If you would like to stick your toe in more technical waters, you might like Ask Not for Whom the Cell Phone Tools (eventually published as Some Problems with the Notion of Context Aware Computing), a one page essay on cultural differences,[as pdf]and a poem on the state of theory in my field called Theory Theory, all of which have amusing bits.

In a more serious vein, you might be interested in reading about how telecommuting has impacted my life in Work and Spirit, On the Experience of Remote Meetings and, Some Notes on Telework.

 

I'm an interaction designer and researcher in the Social Computing Group at IBM's Watson Labs in New York to which I telecommute from my home in Minneapolis. My research focuses on designing systems that enable groups of people to interact coherently and productively: originally focused on online systems, the scope of my work has expanded to include real world environments ranging from rooms to cities.

More generally, I am interested in topics such as genre theory, pattern languages, urban design, real and virtual communities, and the sociology of human-human interaction, all of which inform my approach to systems design. I've been at IBM since June '97; before that I spent 9 years at Apple, and before that 5 years in a now-defunct startup that competed with another startup called Lotus.

If you'd like to read something short:

  • For fun. Originally titled, Ask Not for Whom the Cell Phone Tolls [pdf], this essay reflects on the burgeoning area of "context-aware" computing and pokes a bit of fun at its name. If you're after pure amusement, you may want to read "The Key," which is the full story behind one of the examples in the first essay.
  • Social proxies. This short CACM piece [pdf] provides a glimpse of my design research, which I sometimes summarize with the slogan, 'you can do a lot with little colored dots.'
  • My favorite. My current favorite short piece is Knowing the Particulars [pdf], an essay on Jane Jacobs that discusses her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and its connection to interaction design.
  • Anyone for poetry? In 2009 my poetic reflections on the state of theory in HCI has undergone renewed popularity due to an extemporaneous reading at the HCIC gathering. Find it here: Theory Theory.

If you'd like to read something longer, you can choose among:

  • The most recent overview of my design research in a piece on social intelligence [pdf]
  • An introduction to my interest in pattern languages [pdf]
  • Or try one of my personal favorites, Rhyme and Punishment [pdf], an analysis of an online limerick game.

I also maintain two pages of more general interest: The Apple HI Alumni page (a directory of the alumni of the Apple Human Interface community), and the Interaction Design Patterns page, which tries to collect work on patterns and pattern languages in HCI.

I can be reached at a gif of my email address


Recent

Events (talks, workshops, etc)

HCI Remixed
HCI Remixed book cover

Status: Published!
Aim: The goal of the HCI Remixed project is to produce a collection of essays in which researchers and practitioners reflect on a paper or other piece of work by someone else, that is at least 10 years old, and that has had a personal impact on their view of or approach to HCI.

Persistent Conversation Minitrack & Workshop '09 (Jan 5-8, 2009, at the HICSS conference)
This event, focused on bringing CMC researchers and designers together in a convivial setting, meets every January in Hawaii. Abstracts are due in March 15th, papers June 15th. In addition to the CFP, there is a description of past minitracks, including paper downloads.


... workshop reports, etc ...

Sustaining Community – Incentive Mechanisms in Online Systems: Final Report of the Group 2005 Workshop

Recent additions to this site

Minor updates to "Recent" and the Patterns and AHA pages not listed.

March 2009

  • Socio-Technical Design - Introduction. A 2-page introduction for the Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems (eds. B. Whitworth and A de Moor)
  • General cleanup of patterns page

August 2008

May 2007

March 2007

January 2007


... less recent additions ...


Selected Recent Publications

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.

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. To appear in AI and Society.

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 [as pdf] Theories and Practice in Interaction Design (ed. S. Bagnara, G. Crampton-Smith, G. and Salvendy.) Lawrence Erlbaum: April, 2006.


All publications...

Unpublished essays and reports

CV


Links

Conferences and Events

Resources

 

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