Ongoing Work

I study convivial informatics through the design and development of alternatives to existing computational platforms. This involves platforms that take into consideration digital limits and foster sufficience, maintenance, autonomy, and durability. I favor participatory approaches, and investigate how we can design participatory infrastructures that are resilient to breakdowns. I also study participatory design tools. This ranges from enabling rapid prototyping by non-designers to documenting participatory design activities. I have also worked on more critical approaches to PD.

• [Hiring phds and interns] Understanding software obsolescence, with Nolwenn Maudet and Thomas Thibault.
• Understanding and negotiating digital limits with Nolwenn Maudet and Thomas Thibault.
• Supporting planning and documenting PD workshops with l'Atelier des Chercheurs.
• Turning Explore from the Placed project into a product with Alix Ducros and Raphaelle Bats.
• Understanding situated visualization and data physicalization.

Past Projects

In the past years, I have worked on activity centric computing, i.e., proposing technical and conceptual ways to make activities first class citizens of computing platforms (like files and applications are today). This work involved field studies to understand how people manage activities, technical contributions to demonstrate the feasibility and limits of such proposals, empirical studies to understand how such systems would transform practices. I have applied this work to a variety of domains such as education, sport, scientific research.

• PLACED : Place- and Activity-Centric Services for libraries, with the University of Aarhus, Chalmers University, the French National Library School, Dokk1, the libraries of Lyon and Goteborg.
• Understanding computational notebooks use with A. Rule and J. Hollan.
• Activity Centric Computing, including capturing and visualizing activity, and activity based computing for classroom orchestration.
• User experience of wayfinding in multi-modal mobility.
• Supporting biology researchers in capturing, re-visiting and reflecting on their personnal information (see my dissertation, and post-doc at ITU).

News

If you have you own project that can be a good match with my research, feel free to reach out as we have funding for visitors, and phd candidates. If you are looking for Information Visualisation / Visual Analytics projects in Lyon, check out Romain Vuillemot's webpage, for computer supported learning and gamification, Elise Lavoué.