{"id":913,"date":"2013-01-31T10:38:49","date_gmt":"2013-01-31T18:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/csclab\/?p=913"},"modified":"2013-01-31T10:38:49","modified_gmt":"2013-01-31T18:38:49","slug":"congratulations-to-dr-alex-thayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/csclab\/2013\/01\/congratulations-to-dr-alex-thayer\/","title":{"rendered":"Congratulations to Dr. Alex Thayer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On December 7, 2012 Alex Thayer defended his dissertation entitled &#8220;Understanding University Students\u2019 Use of Tools and Artifacts in Support of Collaborative Project Work&#8221;. Soon after filing on December 28, Alex started work as a Senior HCI Research Scientist at Intel Corporation in Santa Clara. He is also now teaching a course on Game Design at UC Berkeley&#8217;s iSchool. Congratulations, Alex!<br \/>\n<strong>Dissertation Abstract<\/strong><br \/>\nWhen designers collaborate on projects, they use an assortment of tools to generate a variety of<br \/>\nartifacts that help them complete their work. However, it remains unclear how university<br \/>\nstudents use tools and create artifacts as they collaborate on design projects. More importantly, it<br \/>\nis unclear how these students make tool-related decisions throughout their design projects, as<br \/>\nwell as how the different types of work they perform influence their overall collaborative<br \/>\nprocess. Developing a greater understanding of these phenomena will help members of the<br \/>\ncomputer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) community better understand the complex<br \/>\nstructure of collaborative project work, as well as the role of tools and artifacts in both<br \/>\nstructuring and being structured by students\u2019 coordination practices. The current research project<br \/>\nexplores university students\u2019 use of tools and artifacts for collaborative project work by<br \/>\nobserving the work practices and decision-making processes of the students in an advanced<br \/>\ninteraction design class throughout an entire academic quarter. These students performed task<br \/>\nwork, articulation work, and metawork as they consulted their personal toolbelts, decided which<br \/>\ntools to use, and then developed artifacts using those tools, all in order to create the necessary<br \/>\ndeliverables and final design products for the course they were taking. Students\u2019 decisions about<br \/>\nhow to structure their task work influence their choice of tools, and those choices in turn<br \/>\ninfluence their processes of artifact creation as well as their performance of articulation work and<br \/>\nmetawork. This dissertation documents the reflexive nature of that relationship among students\u2019<br \/>\ntool-related decisions, artifact-related creative processes, and collaborative practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On December 7, 2012 Alex Thayer defended his dissertation entitled &#8220;Understanding University Students\u2019 Use of Tools and Artifacts in Support of Collaborative Project Work&#8221;. Soon after filing on December 28, Alex started work as a Senior HCI Research Scientist at Intel Corporation in Santa Clara. He is also now teaching a course on Game Design at UC Berkeley&#8217;s iSchool. Congratulations, Alex! Dissertation Abstract When designers collaborate on projects, they use an assortment of tools to generate a variety of artifacts&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/csclab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/csclab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/csclab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/csclab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/csclab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/csclab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":946,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/csclab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions\/946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/csclab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/csclab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/csclab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}