Ada Lovelace Day - Shaowen Bardzell

As promised, as pledged, here I am writing a blog update. I almost didn't write this post this year because I'm not sure who to pick, who I admire. I had some people in mind but more often than not I didn't know enough about their work to feel that I should be writing about them. And in the end I don't think thats what matters. The technical woman I admire is someone I want to learn more and more about.

Shaowen Bardzell, from the University of Indiana, is taking two things that I care about, that have always been separate in my world and blending them in new and interesting ways. Her latest paper, to appear at CHI2010 in April is titled "Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design." (A Best Paper Winner!) While I haven't been able to read the paper yet, I'm very excited to read what its all about. She was also featured in this past months 'interactions' for her work. Feminism and HCI work really well together and it has, to the best of my knowledge, never been brought together this way. I'm excited to see what buzz this paper will generate and how it will project change in the field of HCI in the future.

HCI is a field of Computer Science that is nearly equally represented by women and men... which is progress since usually men out number women in great numbers. However, in my lab I'm still the only women with a group of guys. A situation that I'm all too comfortable being in. However I'm looking forward to this paper and I'm also very excited for the upcoming special issue of "interacting with computers" to be edited by Shaowen (and Elizabeth F. Churchill another HCI researcher I admire.)

Looking forward to reading more from Shaowen Bardzell!