Science 2.0: The Design Science of Collaboration

Mira Dontcheva   Ben Shneiderman , University of Maryland
    benat signcs.umd.edu

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University May 23, 2008

Studying individual sense-making, collaborative discovery, and social creativity require new forms of science. The traditional sciences of the natural world (let’s call them Science 1.0) have brought astonishing advances during the past 400 years. Science 1.0 will continue to be important, but many modern interdisciplinary problems such as emergency/ disaster response, healthcare, environmental protection, energy sustainability, and international development are resistant to traditional reductionist thinking.  Science 2.0 focuses on the human-designed world in which the dynamics of trust, privacy, responsibility, and empathy are determinants of success.  Advancing Science 2.0 will require a shift in priorities to promote intense collaboration, integrative thinking, teamwork-based education/training, and case study ethnographic research methods.  Science 2.0 will reduce the gulf between basic and applied research, while bringing theory and practice closer together. This talk lays out an ambitious vision that will impact research funding, educational practices, and democratic principles.

NOTE: This is the fourth in a series of talks that Prof. Shneiderman will be delivering at Stanford during his visit as a Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker. The others are:

Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/) at the University of Maryland.  He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001.  He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Ben is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (1980) and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (4th ed. 2004) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/ . He pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web.  His move into information visualization helped spawn the successful company Spotfire http://www.spotfire.com/ . He is a technical advisor for the HiveGroup and Groxis.  With S Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999).  His books include Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press), which won the IEEE Distinguished Literary Contribution award in 2004.

View this talk on line at CS547 on Stanford OnLine or using this video link.

Titles and abstracts for previous years are available by year and by speaker.