Contact Feeds: Bringing Transparency to Corporate Instant Messaging through RSS

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Speaker
Eric Wilcox
Design Researcher, IBM Research, Cambridge MA

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

This talk will present Contact Feeds, a mechanism for gathering and broadcasting online collaborations events such as new email, weblog entries, and team room contributions for a given person. We integrate Contact Feeds into a traditional instant messaging client, modifying the contact list to serve as a Contact Aggregator. Contact Feeds and Contact Aggregators allow users to organize and actively manage their online collaboration. We will look at previous study and prototyping efforts around shared activity spaces that have been a catalyst for this work.

Speaker's Bio

Eric Wilcox is a designer, developer, researcher, and strategist. He has spent the last 4 years in the IBM TJ Watson Research Collaborative User Experience Group where he has led innovative research and forged relationships between research and product. His design communication resulted in the successful tech and conceptual transfer of ideas on the Reinventing Email project. Eric’s early conceptual development and prototypes around weblogs, workflow, and syndication have helped drive strategy for Lotus Development into new and emerging technologies. He has filed for 10 patents around collaborative software designs and systems.

Eric has spent his career making connections between long term strategic vision and the constraints of product development. As an interaction designer at Bodymedia, he prototyped rich internet applications and developed a scalable UI framework. Early research into visual programming languages and interactive visualizations continue to influence his desire to make systems more directly accessible. In his work he strives to bring value and clarity to digital information through the use of design.

Eric has a continued commitment to building community in and around design education. He recently chaired the AIGA Boston Experience Design Community of Interest. He has taught courses in time based media at Lesley University, given invited talks at Harvard GSD, and written for the AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education.

Eric earned BS degrees in both Computer Science and Mathematics at Oregon State University. He holds a MS in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University.

Host
Jodi Forlizzi