DUB Seminar will be conducted using Zoom, via an invitation distributed to the DUB mailing list. Participants who are logged into Zoom using a UW account will be directly admitted, and participants who are not logged in to a UW account will be admitted using a Zoom waiting room.
Around 20% of the global population are currently under coronavirus lockdown and must remain at home. This crisis is having profound consequences for our health and wellbeing, and how we organise and structure our daily activities. In this talk, I will discuss research that we’ve conducted at UCL to understand how people work at home and manage distractions.
Work activities are constantly punctuated by interruptions, and maintaining focus can be challenging. There are three main sources of distraction. First, work tasks are often distributed across different applications (e.g., emails, browsers, documents) and devices (e.g., laptops, phones, tablets), and switching between these is cognitively demanding. Second, new digital distractions abound, from social media and breaking news stories, to new urgent work requests. Third, requirements for remote work, with greater flexibility over when and where work is done, comes at a cost: work must now be juggled with other activities and obligations.
In this talk, I’ll discuss the results of our recent research aimed at understanding how people work at home and manage distractions. To investigate this question we have used different research methods and approaches, from situated observational studies, to online experiments with crowdsourcing platforms. The results of this research give insights into how people can better manage digital interruptions, and how systems can be better designed to help people maintain focus.
Duncan Brumby is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at University College London (UCL). His research is concerned with understanding how people manage digital distractions. He has published 75+ research articles and this research has been supported by grants from the the EPSRC, the European Commission, and EIT Digital. He directs the Human-Computer Interaction MSc programme at UCL, and is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. He received a PhD in Psychology from Cardiff University and has held appointments at Georgia Tech, Drexel University, IADT Dun Laoghaire, University of Sussex, Microsoft Research, and PARC.