We’re back… and with new brilliant minds!

Hello all!

After a nice summer break, the Social Informatics Blog is back, and we bring great news! Lynn Dombrowski and Shad Gross is joining our team of core authors! We are very excited to have them on board and looking forward to their posts. Here is more information about our new members. Welcome Lynn and Shad!

Lynn Dombrowski is a third year doctoral student at the University of California in Irvine in Informatics. Broadly she is interested in social informatics, human computer interaction, and design. Her research topics pertain to exploring how agency, control, and politics manifest in sociotechnical systems and exploring the practical concerns surround issues of access and use of technologies. Currently she’s working on three research projects. First, her work investigates the role of nonprofits in assisting their low-income clients in gaining access to and use of social services and the underlying technologies of social services. Second, her work explores changes in the social relations between the social services and an ecology of stakeholders, including citizens and nonprofits, when new technologies and practices are adopted by the social services. Third, she thinks about how design might better serve communities by encouraging the creation of communal and social capacities to help ensure healthy and successful communities. Website: www.lynndombrowski.com

Shad Gross is first year PhD student in Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington, with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction. His undergraduate degree is in Studio Art from the college of Wooster, with a focus on photography and drawing and has previously worked as a graphic designer, videographer, and developer. His current work focuses on two threads: how material is used in digital devices as part of a communication process and the ways that behavior in virtual worlds relates to behavior in real life. The former has involved using perspectives from material culture and media studies to examine tangible interactions as a communicative process between designer and user. The latter has involved examining the current ways virtual worlds are studied and how this relates to games as related to, but also distinct from, real life. Ultimately, his goal is to combine these, and other, forms of meaning-making into a greater concept of rituals of digital technology, and investigate what this implies for design and use. When not tackling that, he still likes to take photos and generally mess around with graphic design. Website: http://www.shadgross.com