What We Do

We're pretty flexible, but broadly, the Reimagination Lab is about ways to collect, analyze, and visualize the things people do in new ways that generate both personal and public goods. Often (and this is where the "re" comes in) this involves re-using content they've already created and activities they already engage in. For example:

  • Pensieve is about re-using pictures, status messages, blog posts, and even people's paths through the world to help them reminisce, both by themselves and with others.
  • Being Heard lets people explore the archives of communication they build up in email and chat to better understand their relationships with other people.
  • Goalmometer is about helping visualize, manage, and motivate progress on the goals they are already undertaking.
  • SuggestBot is about watching people's editing behavior in Wikipedia, combined with the community's marking of work that needs doing, in order to match people with work they'd like to do, benefitting both them and the community.

We look for problems that have real impact, that have the potential to make people's lives and the world a better place while allowing us to better understand important aspects of human behavior and technology design. We don't always succeed, but we try hard. For more about the people, projects, and publications that live in and come from the lab, you know what do. You can even email Dan Cosley to learn more.

Here's a lovely bit of reimagining from the Extra Ordinary comic, which we keep on our lab door.

Extra Ordinary comic

News
  • October 26, 2011 - The official accept for the HCI special issue on designing for personal memories came yesterday, very exciting. Congrats to Victoria Schwanda, Soyoung Lee, Johnathon Schultz, Tejas Peesapati, and all the folks who worked on papers that helped inform it.
  • October 22, 2011 - Amit Sharma apparently did a very nice job presenting his network-centric recommenders idea at the 3rd Workshop on Recommender Systems and the Social Web.
  • October 18, 2011 -  Victoria Schwanda and Xuan Zhao got themselves a great paper accepted at CSCW about how social media content can help people think about their friendships.
  • October 9, 2011 -  SocialCom went well, fun smaller conference. People were fairly interested in OJ Zhou and Tiffany Ng's pieTime work, and Amit Sharma did a fine job with his presentation of the PopCore recommender in Facebook, which is very cool.
  • June 15, 2011 - Victoria, Amit, and DanCo are all going to the Making Sense of Social Media workshop at ScienceCampus Tuebingen from Aug 1-Aug 4. Exciting to get the word out.
  • May 7, 2011 - CHI went great. Nice questions about what we're doing as a community and how we're doing it, both officially and in 1-on-1 conversations; Victoria did a nice job for her first foray into presentations with her talks around Fit4Life and WiiFit; met good folks; the Bridging Practices, Theories, and Technologies to Support Reminiscence workshop went reasonably well for my first foray into workshop organizing.
  • March 21, 2011 - Although the University of Florida CS is not a hotbed of HCI, Ben Lok, who does some interesting stuff around avatars, invited DanCo down for a talk and there were a lot of thoughtful questions and it was fun.
  • January 17, 2011 - DanCo will be giving a talk about Being Heard and Pensieve at Northwestern's Technology and Social Behavior colloquium on Feb. 24.
  • January 11, 2011 - Victoria, Tejas, and DanCo are helping organize a CHI 2011 workshop called "Bridging Practices, Theories, and Technologies to Support Reminiscence" The deadline is February 11; here's the call for participation.
  • December 6, 2010 - Victoria, Johnathon, Tejas, Soyoung, and I submitted a paper about Pensieve to the HCI special issue on Designing for Personal Memories. Exciting!