Posted on July 3, 2012

Intel Funds $12.5 Million Center to Study IT as Social, Cultural Phenomena

Intel Labs has announced the creation of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing, which will study information technologies and digital media as social and cultural phenomena.

Established in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology and Cornell, Indiana, and New York universities, and based at the University of California, Irvine, the $12.5 million center aims to create new paradigms rooted in the social sciences and humanities for the design and analysis of digital information.

To that end, the center's research will be organized around five themes: materialities of information, or re-thinking "information" as grounded in materials and physical objects; subjectivities of information, or moving beyond "the user" as the center of design; information ecosystems, or how we relate to one another in, around, and through data; creativity and collectivity, or how group-embedded technical creativity can change the world; and algorithmic living, or digital representations and algorithms that change how we understand ourselves.

"The five research themes were all developed with the view that social and technical phenomena are deeply and complexly linked," said Shaowen Bardzell, an assistant professor at Indiana University's School of Informatics and Computing. "Instead of beginning with technical innovations and finding uses for them, which is the traditional computer science approach, and instead of starting with well-defined user needs and developing technologies to support them — the traditional user-centered design approach — these five themes recognize and embrace the complex relationships between technological development and adoption on the one hand, and large-scale socio-cultural phenomena on the other."