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I am a faculty member in the Department of Informatics
in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the
University of California, Irvine. In 2014, I was awarded an honorary doctorate, “Doctor Honoris Causa,” from the University of Umeå in Sweden, for which I am very grateful. I was elected to the CHI Academy in 2013. I co-edit, with Kirsten Foot and Victor Kaptelinin, the MIT Press Acting with Technology Series which has many award-winning titles. I am a founding member of the ICS Center for Research on Sustainability, Collapse-preparedness and Information Technology at UC Irvine and of the Computing within LIMITS Workshop.
New Book!
My newest book, just published by MIT Press, and co-authored with Hamid Ekbia at Indiana University, is Heteromation and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism. It’s not long but we worked on it a long time.
Newer Books
Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method
Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, T.L. Taylor
Foreward by George Marcus
Princeton University Press, September 2012
Activity Theory in HCI Research: Fundamentals and Reflections
Victor Kaptelinin, Bonnie Nardi
Morgan & Claypool Spring 2012
Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Material World.
Paul Leonardi, Bonnie Nardi and Jannis Kallinikos
Oxford University Press, November 2012
Areas of interest:
 Activity
theory proposes that consciousness is shaped by practice, that people
and artifacts mediate our relationship with reality. Consciousness is
produced in the enactment of activity with other people and things, rather
than being something confined inside a human head. Activity theory began
in Russia with the work of Lev Vygotsky in the 1920's, continuing through
his student Aleksey Leontiev, and then through students of Leontiev. This
work has been influential in education, organizational design, and interaction
design. Activity theory works well with design because activity theorists
have always tested their theories in practical ways and believe that application
is an outcome of theory, not a separate activity. In some of my writings
I have discussed how, as a psychological theory, activity theory can be
scaled to collaborative settings without losing sight of individual participants
in an activity.
I am a Senior Editor for Mind, Culture, and Activity, a journal devoted to activity theory.
Related publications
| Making HCI theory work: An analysis of the use of activity theory in HCI research. The impact of activity theory in HCI, with Torkil Clemmensen and Victor Kaptelinin. 2016 |
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| Appropriating Theory. This chapter in Diane Sonnenwald’s book is a personal account of my journey with activity theory. 2015 |
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| Affordances in HCI: Toward a Mediated Action Perspective 2012 |
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| Ensembles: Understanding the Instantiation of Activities. 2009 |
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| Acting with Technology: Activity
Theory and Interaction
Design, with Victor Kaptelinin, MIT Press 2006 |
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| NetWORKers and
their Activity in Intensional Networks 2002 |
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| Co-editor, special issue of Computer-supported
Cooperative Work, "Activity Theory and the Practice of Design,"
with David Redmiles. Volume 11(1-2) 2002 |
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| Co-editor, special issue of Computer-supported
Cooperative Work, "A
Web on the Wind: The Structure of Invisible Work," with Yrjo
Engeström. Volume 8 (1-2) 1998 |
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| Context
and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-computer Interaction,
MIT Press 1996 |
 My most fun research concerns video games! Some of the research is on very serious topics in social media.
Related publications
  The
computer desktop was an amazing design for its time, but does not reflect
the complexity, flexibility, and sociality of human activity. Based on
my research, I have developed several designs that I believe would enhance
the desktop, if it were possible to take them past the prototype stage
and onto actual desktops. I hope the ideas will find their way into the
designs of others. Eventually we will have to reorganize the desktop to
reflect the complex mix of activities users engage in and move beyond
the rigidity of separate applications and files-and-folders. Activity
theory will be useful in this effort as we work to characterize activity.
While ingenious technologies such as blogs and wikis have improved communication,
we need better ways to use digital technologies to organize multiple activities,
establish meaningful contexts for different activities, and collaborate
with others. A different level of design and implementation is needed
to make that happen.
Related publications
 There
is a strong need to find new ways to think about the social and cultural
changes that come with new technologies and to think about new technologies to address pressing social problems. My current work concerns labor and computing and long-term environmental sustainability.
Related publications
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Social Inequality and HCI:
The View from Political Economy Proceedings CHI, with Hamid Ekbia (2016) |
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Computational Agroecology:
Sustainable Food Ecosystem Design Proceedings CHI, with Barath Raghavan and others (2016)
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Toward Alternative Decentralized Infrastructures with Bill Tomlinson, et al. Proceedings ACM DEV (2015) |
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The Political
Economy of Computing: The Elephant in the HCI Room, with Hamid Ekbia. Interactions (2015) |
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On the Margins of the Machine: Heteromation and Robotics, with Hamid Ekbia and Selma Sabanovich (2015) |
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Algorithmic Authority: The Case of Bitcoin, with Caitie Lustig (2015) |
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Offshoring Digital Work (Best Paper nomination, HICSS) (2015) |
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Not Just in it for the Money: Crowdsourcing (with L. Jiang and C. Wagner) (Best Paper nomination, HICSS) (2015) |
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Heteromation and its (Dis)contents: The Invisible Division of Labor between Humans and Machines, with Hamid Ekbia (2014) |
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The Role of Human Computation in Sustainability, or, Social Progress
Is Made of Fossil Fuels (2014) |
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Collapse Informatics and Practice: Theory, Method, and Design (2013) |
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Response to Coburn Report. (2011). With Nicole Ellison, Cliff Lampe |
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Comparative Informatics. (2011). With Ravi Vatrapu, Torkil Clemmensen |
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Infrastructures for Low-cost Laptop use in Mexican Schools. (2010). First author, Ruy Cervantes |
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Forget Online Communities? Revisit Cooperative Work! (2010). First author, Yong Ming Kow |
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The Digital Habitat: Rethinking Experience and Social Practice. (2010). With Jannis Kallinikos and Giovan Francseco Lanzara |
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How We Know What (We Think) We Know about Chinese Gold Farming (2010). With Yong Ming Kow. |
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Who Owns the Mods? (2010). With Yong Ming Kow. |
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Survival Needs and Social Inclusion: Technology Use Among the
Homeless. (2010). First author, Jahmeilah Roberson. |
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Encountering Development Ethnographically. (2009). First author, Nithya Sambasivan. |
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Placeless Organizations: Collaborating
for Transformation (2007) |
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Co-editor, special issue of Transactions on Computer-human
Interaction, "Social Impacts of Technology," with Matt Jones
and Elizabeth Mynatt. Volume 12 (2). 2005. |
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| Information
Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart, with Vicki O'Day.
MIT Press, 1999 |
FUN STUFF
Movie Pundit, 2013
May 7, 2015, Celebration of Teaching Instructional Technology Innovation Award.
Daughter Jeanette with granddaughter Lila (Jeanette’s niece), February 2014
Baby Lionel, big sister Cara, and me, Thanksgiving 2014
University of Siegen, Germany, Economics Reconsidered Workshop, September 2015
Computing within LIMITS, Public Discussion, UC Irvine, December 2015
Here's an interview with me about raiding.
Bonnie Nardi
Department of Informatics
Donald Bren School of Information and
Computer Sciences
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697
Office 5088 Bren Hall
Copyright 2005 Bonnie Nardi - Last updated: December,
2015
University of California, Irvine - Informatics
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