Research Interests and Selected Work

Privacy and autonomy

• Leakiness and creepiness in app space
• Ubicomp’s colonial impulse
• Infrastructures and their discontents
• Privacy issues and HCI, in Security and Usability: Designing Secure Systems That People Can Use. O’Reilly.
• Privacy: Personal information, threats, and technologies
• Hanging on the ‘Wire: A field study of an audio-only media space

Digital money

• Dongles, in Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff. MIT Press.
• From meiwaku to tokushita! Lessons for digital money design from Japan
• Everyday Digital Money workshop
• Real money and its alternatives
• The value of mobile banking, models, and methods: Can you hear me now?
• Navigating Future Moneyscapes scenarios
• What’s in your wallet? Implications for global e-wallet design

Research practice

• The Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing whitepaper
• Anthropology with business: Plural programs and future financial worlds
• Consumerization and renewing people and practices research
• Locaton-based moblogging as method

Consumerization and development

• Reassessing ICTs and development: The social forces of consumption whitepaper
• Consumption, technology, and development: The “poor” as “consumer”
• Cracking representations of the emerging markets: It’s not just about affordability
• Rural broadband expansion in the United States: Citizen perception as a social process

The Chinese internet

• Situating productive play: Online gaming practices and guanxi in China
• “Human-Currency Interaction”: Learning from Virtual Currency Use in China
• A hybrid cultural ecology: World of Warcraft in China

Mobility, urbanity, and architecture

• Living for the global city: Mobile kits, urban interfaces, and ubicomp
• Investigating mobility, technology, and space in homes, starting with “great rooms”
• Aesthetic journeys (study of London transit experience)
• Exploring technology adoption and use through the lens of residential mobility

Technologies for families

• Nurturing technologies in the domestic environment
• Casablanca: designing social communication devices for the home
• Issued US patents on an “electronic pinboard” groups of friends could use to keep connected, on variable video-audio-graphic connections responsive to desired privacy, and on items of home decor over which people could intentionally send and receive “presence” messages (from work at Interval Research Corp.)

Spatial cognition

• Descriptions of simple spatial scenes in English and Japanese
• Why do speakers mix perspectives?
• Reference points and the structure of cognitive maps