Deborah Tatar · Computer Science at Virginia Tech
Microcoordination: a lens for studying the design of collaborative phenomena

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For the last 25 years I have studied the phenomena of human coordination in the small, using various disciplines and methods. However, taken singly, none these disciplines allow us to ask or answer some of the most important questions that face designers today. Two years ago, I came up with the term "microcoordination" to identify this use of multiple disciplines and methods. Last year NSF funded me to work on it. I will outline a case for using the lens of microcoordination to uncover phenomena at the juncture of human coordinative behavior and system design. Then I will talk about a series of probes my lab group has created to examine the social and personal effects of the relationship between people utilizing collaborative artifacts.

Deborah Tatar is Associate Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Psychology, and a Member of the Program for Women and Gender Studies at Virginia Tech. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford in 1998 and spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Departments of Communication and at CSLI, before taking the position of Cognitive Scientist in the Center for Technology and Learning at SRI International. Prior to obtaining her doctorate, she was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC and a Senior Software Engineer at DEC. She got her start in Computer Science at the Logo Lab at MIT. Her BA was in English and American Literature and Language, from Harvard. In addition to trying to reconcile the diverse worlds of psychology, ethnomethodology and epidemiological thinking into the design of interactive systems, she is also busy trying to integrate computational thinking into middle school curriculum!