What do human-centered design interventions look like when we are designing systems that are supposed to serve people for a decade or more? How do we
deal with a design space where stakeholders come from multiple disciplines, and multiple organizations? This talk will briefly discuss previous
ethnographic and empirical work done on coordination and collaboration before touching on more recent work exploring human-centered design for complex
organizations in ocean science, civil traffic management infrastructure, and national educational policy. Early work will be presented towards
developing tools and methods for eliciting community discourse and sensemaking about complex organizing and information pathways.
Providing more questions than answers, this talk posits a research program for Designing at Scales. Ramifications of this research are wide ranging,
including rethinking notions of “loops” and of people’s practices when it comes to AI/ML notions of “human-in-the loop”, augmenting our ability to
understand how complex collaborative ecologies and data journeys interact and change over time. We ask how we can promote the co-creation of knowledge
practices and communities of practice, and how to preserve values of agency and mutual aid as systems “scale up”.
Charlotte P. Lee (PhD in Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Information School of the University of Washington. Dr. Lee researches collaboration in the development of infrastructures, including data intensive science. Her work focuses on empirically describing and theorizing information and coordination practices, artifacts, and collaborative structures. This work is in service of more humane, equitable, and empirically informed design, development, and sustainability of platform ecosystems. She publishes in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Supported Cooperative Work, eScience, and Information Science and collaborates with experts in Ocean Science, Cosmology/Astronomy/Physics, civic transportation infrastructure, and cloud computing/platforms as a service (PaaS). Six of her papers have been nominated for a Best Paper Award at ACM and IEEE conferences. In 2010, she won an NSF CAREER award for outstanding early career teacher-scholars. She has been the recipient of awards from Nokia, Google, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and seven additional awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Lee is also an Associate Editor of the international Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work.