Director Charlotte P. Lee recently received an award of $16,000 from Nokia Research’s US University Collaboration funding program. The award, recently announced by Nokia, will fund a research project entitled Investigating Student Use of Tablets, Phones and Laptops in Collaborative Design Projects. This project will be undertaken as part of the dissertation work of Doctoral Candidate Alex Thayer. Recipients of these unrestricted funds from Nokia Research are first nominated by a Nokia employee and then selected as “the most promising research agendas driven by top researchers in the field” that represent a “compelling vision for the future”. Projects are selected for their business relevance and with an eye for social responsibility.

About the Project

With the exception of independent creatives, content creation rarely happens in a social vacuum. Content creation happens within a larger workflow such as in the context of an office team or work group that must produce a product. An important consideration for work groups, then, is not just “How am I going to read and understand?” but also, “How am I going to produce and share?” This research will study how students use mobile devices and other complementary information technologies to create new content so that we can inform the design of better tablet hardware and software. Few researchers have undertaken research investigating the actual practices of reading and content creation, opting instead to focus on evaluation of existing and prototype features. Consequently, there is still a great deal to be learned about how tablets can support and ultimately amplify individual and group work.