Jeanette Blomberg

jeanette.blomberg@bth.se

Jeanette Blomberg is an industry affiliated Professor of Human Work Science at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. Jeanette recently joined IBM Research Almaden as a research scientist in the Human Systems research group that is focused on understanding relations between people, technology and organizational practices, with the aim of supporting IBM’s strategic outsourcing and business consulting divisions. Prior to assuming her current position at IBM, Jeanette was Director of User Experience Research at Sapient Corporation where she helped establish and managed the Experience Modeling group. While at Sapient she directed and participated in research projects for global technology, energy, automotive, consumer products, and financial services companies. Jeanette was also a founding member of the Work Practice and Technology Area at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). While at PARC she collaborated extensively with Lucy Suchman and Randy Trigg on several long-term research and design projects. Over the years her research has explored issues in social aspects of technology production and use, ethnographically informed design, participatory design, human-centered design, case-based prototyping, and workplace studies. She has published on these topics, given numerous invited talks, and offered workshops in the U.S and Europe on the topic of aligning ethnography and design. Jeanette recently completed a book chapter titled, “An ethnographic approach to design,” which appears in the The Human Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications, edited by Jacko and Sears. Jeanette received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis where she taught courses in cultural anthropology and sociolinguistics.

Projects and Publications

Recent publications

2002 (with M. Burrell and G. Guest) An Ethnographic Approach to Design. In Jacko, J. and A. Sears (eds.), The Human Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., New Jersey pp. 964-986.

2002 (with L. Suchman and R. Trigg) Working Artifacts: Ethnomethods of the Prototype. British Journal of Sociology, 53 (2): 163-179.

2000 (with R. Trigg) Constructing Technical Objects: Reconfiguring the sociotechnical divide. Occasional Papers from the Work Practice Laboratory, Vol. 1, No. 2, Department of Human Work Science and Media Technology, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden.

1999 (with L. Suchman, J. Orr, and R. Trigg) Reconstructing technologies as social practice. In Lehman, P. and N. Wakeford (eds.), Analyzing Virtual Societies: New Directions in Methodology. Special Issue of Applied Behavioral Sciences Journal: 43:3:.

1998 (with F. Kensing) eds. Special issue of Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing on Participatory Design, Kluwer Academic Pub., Netherlands.

Recent Symposium, Workshop and Conference Organization

2002 (with P. Techamuanvivit and C. Yury) User-centered design workshop, Offered at Cisco Systems, San Jose, CA (February).

2000 (with M. Armstrong and C. Yury) Participatory design of Internet environments and web-enabled products and services. Offered at the Participatory Design Conference, New York (November).

1999 (with L. Suchman) Work Practice & Technology: The next 20 years of research. Conference held in Palo Alto and Half Moon Bay, California (June 15-17).

1998 (with J. Orr) Reframing knowledge management: Anthropological perspectives on knowing and acting. Panel at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA.

Recent Presentations

2003 Representations of Practice in Design: Indispensable or Reductionist? Panel at CSCW 2002, New Orleans, LA.

2003 From Experience Models to On Demand Services. Invited presented at IT University of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark (April).

2003 Design-in-use: Reconceptualizing relations between people and technology. Invited session on Where are anthropologists in the chronicle of corporate change? Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting. Portland, OR.

2002 Participatory design in non-profit and commercial settings. Invited presentation for the Knowledge Media Design Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada (October 31, 2002).

2002 Practice-Based Design: The evolution of an approach. Presented at Microsoft Research Center, Redmond, Washington. (May 15, 2002)

2002 What do “users” know anyway? And why should designers care? Presented at Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (January 25, 2002)

2001 From work practice studies to experience modeling research. Presented at High Tech Seminar Series, Sun Microsystems, Cupertino, CA (June 20).

2000 Moving out of the research lab and into the commercial setting. Presented at Workshop on A Decade of Workstudy: Reflections on Ethnography and System Design. Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden (June 16-18).

2000 The uses of video recordings and design representations in field-based research. Presented at Seminar at the Institute of Work, Technology and Organization, Stanford University.

1999 Time and motion in engineering work. Presented at the American Anthropological Association meetings in panel on Time and Motion: From Therbligs to Value Added. (November 17-21)

Design intervention: A resource for social science theorizing. Invited talk at the International Conference on Design and the Social Sciences: Making Connections. (September 29 – October 3) University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.