Paul Dourish

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Paul Dourish is a computer scientist best known for his work at the intersection of computer science and social science. He is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, where he joined the faculty in 2000.

Born and raised in Glasgow, Dourish received a B.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1989. While at Rank Xerox EuroPARC (later the Xerox Research Center Europe) in Cambridge, UK, he completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science at University College London. He has worked in research laboratories at Apple Computer and at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

His published work is primarily in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Computer supported cooperative work, and Ubiquitous computing.

His research tends to draw both on technical and social domains, and speak to the relationship between them. His research topics have included the role of informal awareness in supporting coordination in collaborative systems, the relationship between 'place' and 'space' in information systems, and methodological questions about the use of ethnographic techniques in information systems design.

He published "Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction" (MIT Press) in 2001. This book explores the relationship between phenomenological social science and interaction design, particularly with reference to physically embodied computation and ubiquitous computing. He proposes Tangible computing and Social computing as two different aspects of the same program of investigation, named Embodiment.

At UC Irvine, he teaches in the Informatics department, is a member of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction (LUCI), and in the interdisciplinary graduate program in Arts Comptuation Engineering. In addition to his appointment in Informatics, he has courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Anthropology. From 2004-2006, he was Associate Director at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

[edit] Selected Bibliography

Dourish, P. 2001. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Dourish, P. 2004. What We Talk About When We Talk About Context. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 8(1), 19-30.
Dourish, P. and Anderson, K. 2006. Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as Social and Cultural Phenomena. Human-Computer Interaction, 21(3), 319-342.