Christena Nippert-Eng

This PechaKucha explores the 3 guiding principles for research to create impact: clarity, coordination, and curiosity. Without all these elements, research struggles to make impact for the intended users. In this case, the user is Jojo, a silverback gorilla. Jojo was 80 pounds overweight, and this was caused by a number of reasons. Every solution required a clear framing of the goals, a complex and coordinated effort from everyone involved, and a genuine curiosity to engage in the solutions.

The Quantified Self movement has resulted in tracking and visualization technologies that allow people to become more aware of their own and their pets' activity levels as incentives for living healthier lifestyles. Zoos provide another opportunity within this movement to further promote public awareness of human and animal well-being. In this position paper, we extend the possibilities of the Quantified Self movement to those of the Quantified Other and the Smart Habitat. We explore the possibility of engaging virtual and in-person zoo visitors by allowing them to compare their activity data to that of their pets and zoo animals, and also to promote awareness of animal well-being by comparing the activity data of zoo animals in a variety of habitat configurations. We propose the notion of Interspecies Computer Interaction (ICI) to mutually benefit human and non-human animal well-being.

Everyone worries about privacy these days. As corporations and governments devise increasingly sophisticated data gathering tools and joining Facebook verges on obligatory, concerns over the use and abuse of personal information are undeniable. But the way privacy functions on the virtual frontier of the Internet is only a subset of the fascinating ways we work to achieve it throughout our everyday lives. In Islands of Privacy, Christena Nippert-Eng pries open the blinds, giving us an intimate view into the full range of ordinary people’s sometimes extraordinary efforts to preserve the border between themselves and the rest of the world. Packed with stories that are funny and sad, familiar and strange, Islands of Privacy tours the myriad arenas where privacy battles are fought, lost, and won. Nippert-Eng explores how we manage our secrets, our phone calls and e-mail, the perimeters of our homes, and our interactions with neighbors. She discovers that everybody practices the art of selectively concealing and disclosing information on a daily basis. This important balancing act governs a wide range of behaviors, from deciding whether to give our bosses our cell phone numbers to choosing what we carry in our wallets or purses. Violations of privacy and anxiety about how we grant it to each other also come under Nippert-Eng’s microscope as she crafts a compelling argument that successfully managing privacy is critical for successfully maintaining our relationships with each other and our selves. Roaming from the beach to the bank and from the bathroom to the bus, Nippert-Eng’s keenly observed and vividly told book gives us the skinny on how we defend our shrinking islands of privacy in the vast ocean of accessibility that surrounds us.

In the United States, "privacy" largely centers on the degree to which an individual feels in control over the accessibility of whatever she or he feels is "private." I explore this conceptualization of privacy, drawing primarily on the work of U.S. scholars as well as an ethnographic study including 74 mostly middle and upper-middle class individuals who were interviewed from June 2001-December 2002. I examine the ways in which participants try to achieve privacy as they pursue the principle of "selective disclosure and concealment." I conclude that 1) the affordance of such selectivity may be a key element when it comes to objects, environments, services, and technological systems designed for the U.S., 2) it is important to use familiar (local), easily understood and manipulated mechanisms and metaphors when designing for privacy, 3) notions of privacy may vary widely, and if privacy is an important design consideration, deeper, local understandings of what it means and how it is normally achieved are necessary, and 4) at times, designers might benefit from focusing on the ways in which design features give preference to some stakeholders' interests at the expense of others' via the provision or denial of traditional forms of privacy.

In this essay, the author introduces the concept of “boundary play” as it is manifested in and through interactions with space. Cultural, categorical pairings of concepts—and the classificatory systems that they are part of—are embedded in and evoked by the features of our environment. Accordingly, the ways we define and use space are rife with the possibility of boundary play, that is, the visible, imaginative manipulation of shared cultural-cognitive categories for the purpose of amusement. The discussion focuses on three analytical opportunities: (a) children playing in and around a cagelike dog crate, (b) the design solutions found in the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s McCormick Tribune Campus Center at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and (c) an interactive design project called Tableportation by Giorgio Olivero and Peggy Thoeny. These examples each reflect and encourage our explorations of classificatory boundaries. In the process, they reveal this particular kind of play as well as the worldview that lies behind it.

Consider your keys; calendars; purse and/or wallet contents; commuting, drinking, and reading habits; your lunchtime and vacation plans; the photographs in your living room and work space; and the people with whom you socialize. These items, along with numerous others, have one thing in common. They are dimensions through which each of us draws the line between home and work. Often practical yet eminently symbolic, publicly visible yet intimately revealing, these are the kinds of activities through which each of us places a mental, physical, and behavioral boundary between these two realms.

Do you put family photos on your desk at work? Are your home and work keys on the same chain? Do you keep one all-purpose calendar for listing home and work events? Do you have separate telephone books for colleagues and friends? In Home and Work, Christena Nippert-Eng examines the intricacies and implications of how we draw the line between home and work. Arguing that relationships between the two realms range from those that are highly "integrating" to those that are highly "segmenting," Nippert-Eng examines the ways people sculpt the boundaries between home and work. With remarkable sensitivity to the symbolic value of objects and actions, Nippert-Eng explores the meaning of clothing, wallets, lunches and vacations, and the places and ways in which we engage our family, friends, and co-workers. Commuting habits are also revealing, showing how we make the transition between home and work selves though ritualized behavior like hellos and goodbyes, the consumption of food, the way we dress, our choices of routes to and from work, and our listening, working, and sleeping habits during these journeys. The ways each of us manages time, space, and people not only reflect but reinforce lives that are more "integrating" or "segmenting" at any given time. In clarifying what we take for granted, this book will leave you thinking in different ways about your life and work.

This article presents a discussion of the relationship between classification systems and individuals' everyday activities. The concept of “boundary work” is defined as the practices that concretize and give meaning to mental frameworks by placing, maintaining, and challenging cultural categories. “Home” and “work” provide a case study for examining boundary work across a range of realm relationships, from those that are highly “integrating” to those that are highly “segmenting.” Boundary practices involving calendars and keys, clothes and appearances, eating and drinking, money, people and their representations (like photographs and gifts), talk styles and conversations, reading materials and habits, and work breaks (including lunches and vacations) are discussed. Mary Douglas's work on categorical purity helps illustrate the relationship between cognitive order and visible behavior seen in the boundary work of home and work.