The SocialWorlds research group conducts research in three major areas:

• Information access. Information use within organizations or groups has a social dimension to it. We've largely examined organization memory (collective memory, knowledge management).
• Privacy. This is the flip-side of information use, and privacy has an obvious social dimension. (If no one else wants to know, there's no privacy problem.) The usability of privacy enhancing technologies also has a social dimension.
• Virtual communities (aka social computing). Online communities are about social interaction, no matter what flavor of online community being discussed. We've study a range of online systems from bulletin boards to game systems to chat.

The theoretical focus of the SocialWorlds research group's work is on considering the interplay of the social world with computational systems. We're interested in co-design spaces - places where you need to consider how to incorporate elements of the social world within software systems (such as with computer-supported cooperative work systems) and also consider how systems will affect their social settings in return. In some cases, such as privacy, both have to be designed or at least considered simultaneously.

This kind of research requires a dual emphasis on both the technology and the social structures of its use. The above three research areas have varying levels of interplay between social structures and technical systems. In virtual communities, the social world constructed is everything. In collaborative information access, they are the conditions for effective use. Privacy is between. Our practical focus is on building usable systems to help people with their privacy; to help groups better manage and access their information, and to create communities. We also study how our systems affect the people that use them. See the publications page or the projects page for more info on each research stream.