Tom Erickson
Thomas Erickson is a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research
Center in New York where he works on designing systems that support network
mediated group interaction. His research involves exploring
the design and use of social proxies, minimalist graphical visualizations
of people and their activities in online environments. The basic claim
is that making people and their activities mutually visible to one another
enables the social processes (such as imitation, norming, and peer pressure)
that make our face-to-face interactions coherent, productive and engaging,
to come into play in online interactions. Applications of these ideas
range from environments for online work communities to supporting ecommerce
activities like auctions and queues. More recently Tom has become interested
in the issue of identity—of objects, people, groups and organizations—
andthe ways in which it (and related matters like privacy and reputation
are shaped by socio-technical systems.
Originally trained in cognitive psychology, Tom gradually morphed into
an interaction designer and researcher via stints in a small startup (5
years) and Apple's Advanced Technology Group (9 years); he has been at
IBM since 1997. His approach to systems design is shaped by work in sociology,
rhetoric, architecture and urban design. He has contributed to the design
of many products, and authored about 50 publications on topics ranging
from personal electronic notebooks and information retrieval systems to
pattern languages and virtual community.
Contact information:
Email: snowfall@us.ibm.com
Phone: (612) 823-3663
Internal Address: [not recommended, as I'm a telecommuter]
External Address:
 3136
Irving Ave. S.,
Minneapolis
MN 55408-2515 USA
Publications: (See my external web site for most recent publications and online versions)
 Erickson, T. Five Lenses: Towards a Toolkit for Interaction Design.[pdf] Foundations of Interaction Design (ed. S. Bagnara and G. Crampton-Smith.) Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, in press, 2005.
Halverson, C. A., Erickson, T., and Ackerman, M. S. "Behind the Help Desk: Evolution of a Knowledge Management System in a Large Organization." The Proceedings of CSCW 2004. New York : ACM Press, 2004.
Erickson, T. "Designing Online Collaborative Environments: Social Visualizations as Shared Resources." Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on the Language Action Perspective on Communication Modeling (LAP 2004). New Brunswick , NJ : Rutgers , pp 143-158.
Erickson, T. and Kellogg, W.A. "Social Proxy." The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction. Berkshire Publishing Group, LLC, 2004.
Voida, A., Mynatt, E. D., Erickson, T. and Kellogg, W. A. "Interviewing Over Instant Messaging." The Proceedings of CHI 2004. New York : ACM Press, 2004.
Erickson, T., Huang, W., Danis, C., and Kellogg, W. A. "A Social Proxy for Distributed Tasks: Design and Evaluation of a Working Prototype." The Proceedings of CHI 2004. New York : ACM Press, 2004.
Halverson, C. A., Erickson, T. & Sussman, J. "What Counts as Success? Punctuated Patterns of Use in a Persistent Chat Environment." The Proceedings of GROUP 2003. New York : ACM Press, 2003.
Erickson,
T. "Designing Visualizations of Social Activity: Six Claims" The Proceedings of CHI 2003: Extended Abstracts. In press. New York: ACM
Press, 2003.
Churchill,
E. and Erickson, T. "Introduction to this Special Issue on Talking
about Things in Mediated Conversations" Human Computer Interaction,
Vol. 18 Nos. 1&2, pp 1-12. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003.
Erickson,
T. and Kellogg, W. A. "Knowledge Communities: Online Environments
for Supporting Knowledge Management and its Social Context." Sharing
Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management (eds. Ackerman, Mark, Volkmar Pipek,
and Volker Wulf). Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003, pp. 299-326.
Erickson,
T. and Kellogg, W. A. "Social Translucence: Using Minimalist Visualizations
of Social Activity to Support Collective Interaction." Designing
Information Spaces: The Social Navigation Approach (eds. K. Höök,
D. Benyon, and A. Munro). Springer, 2003, pp. 17-42.
Erickson,
T. "Some Problems with the Notion of Context-Aware Computing."
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 45, No. 2, pp 102-104. February, 2002.
(Technical Opinion).
Erickson,
T. "Lingua Francas for Design: Sacred Places and Pattern Languages."
The Proceedings of DIS 2000 (Brooklyn, NY, August 17-19, 2000). New York:
ACM Press, 2000, pp 357-368.
Erickson,
T. Making Sense of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC): Conversations
as Genres, CMC Systems as Genre Ecologies.The Proceedings of the Thirty-Third
Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science. (ed. J. F. Nunamaker,
Jr. R. H. Sprague, Jr.), January, 2000. IEEE Press.
Erickson,
Thomas. Towards a Pattern Language for Interaction Design. Workplace Studies:
Recovering Work Practice and Informing Systems Design. (ed. P. Luff, J.
Hindmarsh, C. Heath). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Erickson,
Thomas. "Rhyme and Punishment: The Creation and Enforcement of Conventions
in an On-Line Participatory Limerick Genre." In the Proceedings of
the Thirty-Second Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science.
(ed. J. F. Nunamaker, Jr. R. H. Sprague, Jr.), January, 1999.
Erickson,
Thomas. "Persistent Conversation: Discourse as Document." [Minitrack
Introduction] In the Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Hawaii International
Conference on Systems Science. (ed. J. F. Nunamaker, Jr. R. H. Sprague,
Jr.), January, 1999. Also republished as "Persistent Conversation:
An Introduction" in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication,
Vol. 4, #4, June 1999.
Erickson,
Thomas. "Some Notes on the Experience of Being a Teleworker,"
The Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter (ed. David
Seamon), vol 9, No. 3, Fall 1998. (A modified version of my contribution
to Scholtz, et al., below.)
Scholtz,
J., Bellotti, V., Schirra, L., Erickson, T., DeGroot, J., & Lund,
A. "Telework: When Your Job is On The Line." Interactions, Vol.
V.1. January/February 1998.
Bayle,
E., Bellamy, R., Casaday, G., Erickson, T., Fincher, S., Grinter, B.,
Gross, B., Lehder, D., Marmolin, H., Potts, C., Skousen, G. & Thomas,
J. "Putting It All Together: Towards a Pattern Language for Interaction
Design. Summary Report of the CHI '97 Workshop" SIGCHI Bulletin,
ACM: January, 1998.
Erickson,
Thomas. Social Interaction on the Net: Virtual Community as Participatory
Genre. The Proceedings of the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference
on Systems Science. (ed. J. F. Nunamaker, Jr. R. H. Sprague, Jr.) Vol
6, pp. 23-30. IEEE Computer Society Press: Los Alamitos, CA, 1997.
Erickson,
Thomas. Designing Agents as if People Mattered. Intelligent Agents (ed.
J Bradshaw). AAAI Press: 1997.
Erickson,
Thomas. Design as Storytelling. Interactions, July/August 1996.
Erickson,
Thomas. The Design and Long-Term Use of a Personal Electronic Notebook.
Human Factors in Computing: The Proceedings of CHI '96. April 1996.
Erickson,
Thomas. The World Wide Web as Social Hypertext. In "Viewpoints,"
Communications of the ACM. January, 1996.
Erickson,
Thomas. Notes on Design Practice: Stories and Prototypes as Catalysts
for Communication . Scenario-Based Design: Envisioning Work and Technology
in System Development. (ed. J. Carroll). New York: Wiley & Sons, 1995.
Erickson,
Thomas. From Interface to Interplace: The Spatial Environment as a Medium
for Interaction. The Proceedings of the European Conference on Spatial
Information Theory. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1993.
Kahle,
B., Morris, H., Davis, F., Erickson, T., Hart, C., & Palmer R. Wide
Area Information Servers: An Executive Information System for Unstructured
Files. Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development Conference
Proceedings 544: International High Speed Networks for Scientific and
Technical Information. October, 1993.
Erickson,
Thomas. Artificial Reality and the Visualization of Data. Virtual Reality
Applications (ed. A. Wexelblat). Academic Press, 1993.
Personal website or personal page:
http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/
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