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Socio-Digital Systems

Elegant technologies for complex lives

 Socio-Digital Systems (SDS) aims to use an understanding of human values to help to change the technological landscape in the 21st century. Beyond making us all more productive and efficient, we ask how we can build technology to help us be more expressive, creative, and reflective in our daily lives.

Our group considers a broad range of human values, aims to understand their complexity, and puts them front and centre in technology development. An important aspect of this endeavour is the construction of new technologies that, in turn, we ourselves can shape. In so doing, we may create new ways that help us to actively realise our aspirations and desires, to engage with or disconnect from the world around us, to remember our past or to forget it, to connect with others or disengage from them. Important here are technologies which ultimately make our lives richer, and which offer us choice and flexibility in the things that we do.

SDS does this through the bringing together of social science, design and computer science. We believe that by understanding human values, we open up a space of new technological possibilities that stretches the boundaries of current conceptions of human-computer interaction.

SDS Themes

This group develops its work through themes that represent interlocking sets of social and technical concerns. Currently, SDS is investigating the following.

Cultural Cargoes Icon - Book Visualization  The Changing Form of Cultural Cargoes   Creativity in Daily Life
The Future of Looking Back   Interacting without touching
Machine Encounters (thumbnail) 

Machine encounters

Making Meaning in 21st Century Communication
  New ways of seeing Rewriting Implicit Values: Moving from Fixed to Mobile

 Our past themes are available here.

Affiliates

                 

Buxton,
Bill  

 

Gosset,
Phil  

 

Molloy,
Mike

 

 

 

 

 

Kenton O'Hara    Dave Kirk       

 

     

O'Hara,
Kenton

 

Kirk,
Dave

           

Careers
  • The Socio-Digital Systems group are always looking for interns and Post-docs. For more information, visit Microsoft Research Careers.
Press Coverage
  • Microsoft Research TechFest 2007 - Technology on the Wall
  • Inside Microsoft's future kitchen BBC News
  • Microsoft TechFest gazes into future, India Times News Network
  • At TechFest, Microsoft gives everyday objects a tech makeover
Contact Us
  • Socio-Digital Systems
    Microsoft Research
    7 J J Thomson Ave
    Cambridge CB3 0FB, UK
    +44 1223 479700