Contact: Jahmeilah Roberson

Despite the heath issues closely associated with homelessness and poverty, the primary need for most homeless people is to survive life on the streets by finding food and shelter. Healthcare, while important, is often secondary. The lack of control over housing and diet often leads to these health problems within the homeless community and contributes to making them extremely difficult to treat and control. Homeless people often suffer from multiple illnesses where coordinating healthcare resources and obtaining health care information play the key roles in the disease management process.

The health care needs surrounding chronic diseases are a huge challenge for homeless people since medication, diet, and basic living interact in the course of disease management. The plan is to conduct a field study in a homeless health organization to
examine the barriers and needs for homeless and poverty stricken to obtain sufficient health care information and to explore opportunities to design and implement technological interventions to help both the homeless and the health care organizations to engage in more effective health care practice.

Contact: Nithya Sambasivan

The recent move towards user-generated content in social media has resulted in the proliferation of online content production services such as wikis, blogs, and photo sharing websites. One of the most successful technologies in this realm is online classifieds services, such as Craigslist. This service allows users to post advertisements, such as rentals, jobs, consumer goods, tickets, automobiles, along with the means to contact the poster of the advertisement. Such user-driven websites allow anyone with access to the technology to create and edit content, for free.

Contact: Bonnie Nardi

The computer desktop was an amazing design for its time, but does not reflect the complexity, flexibility, and sociality of human activity. 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.