Well little seems to have changed at the university since the pandemic. I’m back teaching in classrooms (thankfully) but I’m not sure many faculty got the message about returning to work as hybrid and virtual meetings now seem a regular part of our working arrangements. Will full F2F life ever return? Am teaching my Writing Studio this Spring, 2024, always a highlight, and my Understanding Users course in Fall. Note to students or incoming applicants: Please don’t write asking me for a TA position – these are handled centrally by the administration, not by individuals teaching the course.
My research over the last year or two has concentrated on my recent book examining the nature of users (it is now available here). I want to us to rethink user-centered design to consider the full human experience, from physical to social, and this book will explain my argument for the ‘vertical slice’ through the layers of boundaries in social science. We are all physical, perceptual, cognitive, social and cultural beings in one material form living in a hybrid physical and digital space. Let’s design for that! Just putting the final touches on the contract for my next book, on the human desire to collect, and the infrastructure and human foibles that emerge around this – more on this as I firm it up. You can get a taste of what I am developing in this recent article for Art Basel on why people collect. Am I now a monograph author exclusively? I don’t think so but it’s where my mind is at the moment.
After 15 years as Dean of the School of Information, I returned to life as a faculty member, joyfully, in 2018. I study humans and the emerging information infrastructure, with the goal of shaping information space to serve humans better. My work engages design, augmenting human behavior, and advancing more inclusive and socially acceptable information spaces. I earned a PhD in Psychology from Loughborough University, an an M.A. (1st class) from University College Cork. I hold the V.M. Daniel Professorship here in the iSchool as well as appointments in Psychology and the School of Business. I also serve on the Faculty Advisory Board of IC2 at UT.
Prior to life in Texas, I was a founding faculty member of the School of Informatics at Indiana University and a Research Fellow at Loughborough. I serve on the editorial boards of Journal of Documentation, Interacting with Computers, and am now editor of Information & Culture (we’ve broadened the scope and want your papers, so contact me!)
Read my InfoMatters blog to get some of my latest words on all matters information-related.
More about me and my work can be found in the links below, feel free to reach out. Email is my preferred channel – adillon @ ischool.utexas.edu
[LinkedIn] [GoogleScholar][ResearchGate]