Bonnie Nardi - Interests

Interests

Her interests are in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Computer supported cooperative work, more specifically in activity theory, computer-mediated communication, and interaction design. Prof. Nardi has researched CSCW applications and blogging, and has more recently pioneered the study of World of Warcraft in HCI. She has studied the use of technology in offices, hospitals, schools, libraries and laboratories.

She is widely known among librarians - especially research, reference and digital librarians - for Chapter 7 of Information Ecologies, which focused on librarians as keystone species in information ecologies. Nardi's book inspired the title of a UK conference Information Ecologies: the impact of new information 'species' hosted, inter alia, by the UK Office of Library Networking, now known by its acronym UKOLN, and led to a keynote address by Nardi at a 1998 Library of Congress Institute on Reference Service in a Digital Age. She had written Information Ecologies while a researcher at ATT Labs Research.

Nardi's self-described theoretical orientation is "activity theory", a philosophical framework developed by the Russian psychologists Vygotsky, Luria, Leont'ev, and their students. "My interests are user interface design, collaborative work, computer-mediated communication, and theoretical approaches to technology design and evaluation." She is currently conducting an ethnographic study of World of Warcraft.