Jofish Kaye · Yahoo!
Comfortable, Communal and Creative Computing

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The last two years have seen an explosion of growth in tablet computing. In this talk I discuss a qualitative interview-based study of early tablet owners in the San Francisco Bay Area, in which we tried to understand the role of tablet computing in their everyday lives. I use findings from this study to explore three key areas for research in day-to-day computing practices: comfortable computing, recognizing and exploring the impact of computing environment on usage and vice versa; communal computing, the role of computing technologies and practices within the family; and new styles of creative computing, exploring the changing nature of creativity, curation and consumption in a keyboard-less world.

Jofish Kaye is a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Labs. His research explores the social, cultural, and technological effects of technology on people, and how people's decisions and behaviors can change those technologies. These studies have recently included studies of families' values and technology choices, visualizations of Twitter and publications, and the use of NFC-enabled phones to help track clean water supplies in Haiti. His previous work has included ethnographic, cultural, critical and technological studies of grassroots creative leisure practices such as hacking and tinkering, academics' archiving practices, couples in long distance relationships, the role of women in computing, computerized smell output, and smart homes and kitchens. He has a Ph.D in Information Science from Cornell, a Masters degree in Media Arts & Sciences and a B.S. in Cognitive Science, both from MIT, and is occasionally a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford.