Tom Erickson
I’m an interaction designer and researcher in the Social Computing Group at IBM’s Watson Labs in New York to which I telecommute from my home in Minneapolis. My research focuses on designing systems that enable groups of people to interact coherently and productively: originally focused on online systems, the scope of my work has expanded to include real world environments ranging from rooms to cities. My current focus is on urban computing and on the design of mobile based systems for developing economies. I also continue my active interest in the practices that grow up around long-term use of social software, and especially in the ways that usage practices outlast any particular group of users.
More generally, I am interested in topics such as genre theory, pattern languages, urban design, real and virtual communities, and the sociology of human-human interaction, all of which inform my approach to systems design. I’ve been at IBM since June ’97; before that I spent 9 years at Apple, and before that 5 years in a now-defunct startup that competed with another startup called Lotus.
Contact information
Email: snowfall@us.ibm.com, Thomas Erickson/Watson/IBM@IBMUS
Phone: (612) 823-3663 (home office); (612) 242-9545 (primarily when traveling)
Internal Address: None, I work solely out of my home office in Minneapolis
External Address: 3136 Irving Ave S, Minneapolis, MN, 55408-2515
Publications
My most recent papers are
Panciera, K., Priedhorsky, R., Erickson, T., and Terveen, L. Lurking? Cyclopaths? A Quantitative Lifecycle: Analysis of User Behavior in a Geowiki. Proc. CHI 2010. ACM Press, 2010.
Farrell, R. G., Danis, C. M., Erickson, T., Ellis, J. B., Christensen, J. E. Bailey, M. and Kellogg, W. A. A Picture and a Thousand Worlds: Visual Scaffolding for the Developing World. International Journal of Handheld Computing Research. To appear, 2010.
Erickson, T. ‘Social’ Systems: Designing Digital Systems that Support Social Intelligence. AI and Society, 23:2, 147-166, 2009.
Erickson, T. Socio-Technical Design. Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems (eds. B. Whitworth and A de Moor), pp 333-334. IGI Global, 2009.
Erickson, T., Danis, C., Kellogg, W. A., Helander, M. E.. Assistance: The Work Practices of Human Administrative Assistants and their Implications for IT and Organizations. Proc. CSCW ’08. ACM Press, 2008.
Erickson, T. “Knowing the Particulars.” In Erickson, T. and McDonald, D. W. (eds) HCI Remixed: Essays on Works that have Influenced the HCI Community. pp 87-91. MIT Press, 2008.
and of course I shouldn’t pass up a chance to plug a book that I’ve co-edited with David McDonald: HCI Remixed: Essays on Works that have Influenced the HCI Community. MIT Press, 2008. It’s a book of essays that I characterize as bedtime stories for HCI geeks.
For a complete list of publications, see my external site: http:/www.visi.com/~snowfall/publications.html
