James Hollan
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Professor Hollan is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at University of California, San Diego. He is the founding co-director of the Distributed Cognition & HCI Lab and the Design Lab. His research explores the cognitive consequences of computational media. It is motivated by a belief that we are at the beginning of a paradigm shift in thinking about representational media, one that is starting to appreciate the importance of representations that are not only dynamic and interactive but also adapt to the structure of tasks, the history and context of activities, and our relationships with others. The goal is to better understand the cognitive, computational, and social ecology of dynamic interactive adaptive systems.
Professor Hollan’s interests span across cognitive design, distributed and embodied cognition, human-computer interaction, multiscale information visualization, multimodal interaction, cognitive ethnography, and software tools for design and visualization. My work involves four intertwined activities: developing theory and methods, designing representations, implementing prototypes, and evaluating their effectiveness to better understand the broader design space in which they are situated.
In November 2023, he joins the IAS for a two-month writing residency.
Research Interests
Cognitive Science, Information Visualization, Human-Computer Interaction
Paris IAS Visit: A Network-of-Networks Collaboratory to Address the Grand Challenge of the Future of Information Work at the Human-Technology Frontier
The CDIW focuses on designing human-centered information spaces. This is both an idea, and a computational environment. It is the idea of a spatial cognitive workspace---a desktop for intellectual activity---reified as a computational environment that actively supports the coordination of information-based work. Specifically, the information environment should develop awareness of the history and structure of a user's action: how she accomplishes activities through discrete tasks across devices, programs, and working sessions. Through use, information in the environment accumulates structure and context: not only who accessed it and when, but concurrent activity and semantic relationships to other related information and activities. The context and history of activity should drive the behavior of information. To the user, her information should seem alive, have awareness, know where it came from, how it got there, what it means---and behave accordingly. It is important to emphasize that the human-centered information space will not replace the user's ecosystem of documents and applications, but be a separate space linked to them, acting as a home, a control center, a multi-modal but fundamentally `spatial workshop' where information across applications will converge with visual features and active behaviors that support the user in not only completing her tasks, but accomplishing overarching activities.
Key publications
"Towards a Dynamic Multiscale Personalized Information Space: Beyond Application and Document Centered Views of Information". Amy R. Fox, Philip Guo, Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose, Peter Dalsgaard, Arvind Satyanarayan, Haijun Xia and James D. Hollan, 4th International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming, Porto, Portugal. Proceedings of the Convivial Computing Salon at PROGRAMMING 2020. https://doi.org/10.1145/3397537.3397542
"Thinking with Computers". James D. Hollan, SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award, Proceeding of CHI'15, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Seoul, Korea, 817-820, 2015.
"Distributed Cognition: Toward A New Theoretical Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research". James D. Hollan, Edwin L. Hutchins, and David Kirsh. In J. M. Carroll, editor, Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium, 75–94. Addison-Wesley, 2001.
 Fifth session of the "Paris IAS Ideas" talk series, with the participation of Jim Hollan, University of California San Diego, Paris IAS Fellow |
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