Welcome to the TMI Lab! We conduct research in human–computer interaction, at the intersection of personal information management, user interface design, ubiquitous computing, and computer-supported cooperative work. Our work focuses on helping people to overcome the day-to-day challenges of information overload.
As computing has become an increasingly pervasive part of our lives, people now have access to their electronic information across a larger variety of networked devices, in more places, among different groups of friends or co-workers, and while participating in a broader range of activities than ever before. And as access to information increases, so does the amount of information that people create, receive, share…and have to manage. Most of the computing interfaces that people use on a daily basis simply weren’t designed to help us make sense of information at this scale. In this research, we aim to address this problem—we study how people manage their information in the real world, and design new interfaces and computing systems to minimize the impact of information overload.
We’re particularly interested in re-examining the interfaces that we use every day—file browsers, the desktop, our smartphone home screens, domestic technologies—and the ways that electronic information is represented within our computing systems in order to help make the next generation of computers more responsive to the ways that people naturally organize and manage their projects, collaborations, and everyday lives.
Feel free to explore our projects, past and present!
– The TMI team
