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Technology in Meetings

Ethnographic Analysis (.pdf)
For this project, I worked with a teammate to observe the interaction between people and technology in meetings. Specifically, our goal was to determine the problems and issues faced by people interacting with technology during meetings on the Georgia Tech campus. Our research question was: what types of difficulties and successes do people have with current technologies in meetings? We were concerned with technology in a broad sense. By technology, we were referring to all the non-human resources that people have to help them conduct their meeting, ranging from lighting, chairs, tables, and the physical space of the room to projectors, laptops, desktops, cellular phones, and landline phones. We were interested in whether such technologies disrupt meetings, and if so, how. We were also interested in questions such as: do technologies support meeting participants? How do people use different technologies in meetings, both individually and collaboratively? How do certain aspects of the room (such as whiteboards, projectors, sound systems, etc) affect the way a meeting is held? How are technologies utilized in meetings and what are the implications that arise from the way meeting participants interact with these technologies? We observed two meetings, one administrative-style meeting and one presentation-style meeting. From the fieldnotes gathered, we proceeded to use grounded theory to analyze our collected data. From this analysis, we arrived at a final storyline: Technologies used in meetings drive interactions among people and their surroundings by shaping how people communicate with each other and manage the space around them.
Teammate: Sheena Lewis CS 6455 (User Interface Design and Evaluation) is a graduate level course that introduces the emergence of qualitative methods through the fields of anthropology and sociology. The aim of the course is to teach students the (HCI) data gathering and analysis techniques that constitute qualitative methods. These methods include observation, interviewing, writing fieldnotes, and analysis. Students not only learn about these various methods and how to choose between different ones, but also how to incorporate these methods into proper study design. The course also requires students to conduct a qualitative study in pairs.