Associate Professor
Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences, UC Irvine

Phone:   (949) 824-8127
E-mail:   jpd@ics.uci.edu
Website:   http://www.dourish.com/

Research interests:
computer supported cooperative work; human computer interaction

Dr. Dourish's main interests are in Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. In other words, he is interested not just in how we can build novel interactive systems, but also in what happens when people start to use them. He has worked on topics such as media spaces, awareness systems, self-disclosing systems, computational reflection, collaborative toolkits and workflow.

His concerns are organized primarily around the inter-relationship between system design and practice. By system design, he means not just specific design of individual software systems, but the basic features out of which software systems are constructed -- features such as abstraction, identity, modularity and equivalence. By practice, he means, simply, what people do. Although he is often mistaken for a user interface person, he cares less about interfaces and more about interaction -- how people organize their behaviour around the structure of software systems. He believes that interaction is not simply a matter of coloured pixels on the screen, scroll bars, buttons and menus, but instead is an issue of software architecture and the very nature of computation.

His research addresses topics such as the appropriation technologies in work practice, awareness and coordination mediated by technical artifacts, the flexibility of technical designs, and the communicative potential of software structures. His PhD dissertation, for example, considered a novel approach for building flexible and adaptable toolkits for collaborative applications, one that allowed programmers to adapt the basic structures that the toolkit offered. More recently, he has applied the same approach to reorient the relationship between users and software infrastructures, allowing a more seamless integration between the activities of each.