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Who: Judith Donath, Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and the founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab
Title: Inventing Sociable Media
Dr. Judith Donath is the founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. She created several of the earliest social applications for the web and her work with the Sociable Media Group has been shown in museums and galleries worldwide. She is the author of The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online (MIT Press) and is known internationally for her writing on identity, interface design, and social communication.
Title: Inventing Sociable Media
Summary: Computer networks provide the communicative backbone for millions of people to connect and communicate with each other online. But it is the interface – the applications – that shape their interactions. The interface determines what the participants see of each other and the actions they can perform.
I have been designing social interfaces for over 20 years and in this talk I will discuss the thinking behind several projects – how did we come up with the idea? what problem were we addressing? how successful was our solution?
bio: Judith Donath synthesizes knowledge from urban design, evolutionary biology and cognitive science to design innovative interfaces for on-line communities and virtual identities. A Harvard Berkman Faculty Fellow and formerly director of the MIT Media Lab’s Sociable Media Group, she is known internationally for her writing on identity, interface design, and social communication. She is the creator of many pioneering online social applications; her work and that of the Sociable Media Group have been shown in museums and galleries worldwide. She is the author of The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online (MIT Press, 2014). Her current research focuses on how we signal identity in both mediated and face-to-face interactions, and she is working on a book about how the economics of honesty shape our world.
She received her doctoral and master’s degrees in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT and her bachelor’s degree in History from Yale University.