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SUMMARY:Understanding People Understanding Technology - Elizabeth Mynatt a
 nd Amy Voida\, GVU Center\, Georgia Tech
DTSTART:20061030T110000Z
DTEND:20061030T120000Z
UID:TALK5816@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:4461
DESCRIPTION:The increasing importance of understanding how people use tech
 nology brings\nwith it the greater challenge of understanding how people u
 nderstand\ntechnology. In our research and educational programs at Georgia
  Tech\, we are\ninvestigating new lenses that illuminate how people consum
 e and produce\ncomputing experiences as reflections of their daily lives. 
 Every day people\nappropriate technologies\, actively construct new meanin
 gs for technologies\,\ninterpret\, and reinterpret those technologies. Thi
 s active engagement with\ntechnology drives the emergence of a new underst
 anding of human\nrelationships with computational technology ­ human-cent
 ered computing. In\nthis talk\, we provide an overview of this perspective
  and then highlight one\nresearch program specifically engaging people¹s 
 active interpretations of\ntechnology. The idea of studying interpretation
 s is not new\; over many\ncenturies\, philosophers\, theologians\, and oth
 er hermeneutic scholars have\ncontributed to our understanding of how peop
 le read and interpret texts.\nContemporary scholars argue that people read
  and interpret texts beyond\nthose bound between the covers of books\; peo
 ple read and interpret a much\nwider breadth of media\, artifacts\, experi
 ences\, and institutions. Here\, we\nexplore computer-mediated communicati
 on technologies as texts\, drawing from\nmultiple empirical studies to beg
 in to describe the nature of technological\ninterpretations. 
LOCATION:Small Lecture Theatre\, Microsoft Research
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