Gloria Mark

Dept. of Informatics
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
University of California, Irvine

Over the last several years I have been studying the different ways that information workers experience disruptions in their work and how they can maintain continuity in their work. In this talk I will present empirical results from fieldwork observations and experiments over three years which detail how information workers experience a high level of fragmentation in their work, irrespective of their organizational role. Not only do information workers switch continually among multiple tasks but they also switch continually among interactions in varied workplace contexts, such as the work home and organization. I will discuss how multi-tasking impacts various aspects of collaboration and communication in the workplace. These results challenge the traditional way that most IT is designed to organize information, i.e. in terms of distinct tasks. Instead, I will discuss how IT should support information organization in a way consistent with how most people were found to organize their work, which is in terms of much larger thematically connected units of work.

Bio

Gloria Mark is Professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine since 2000. Dr. Mark received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University. Prior to UCI, she was a Research Scientist at the GMD (German National Research Center for Information Technology), in Bonn, Germany, a visiting research scientist at the Boeing Company, and a research scientist at the Electronic Data Systems Center for Advanced Research. Dr. Mark's research focuses on the design and evaluation of collaborative systems. Her current projects include studying multi-tasking of information workers, technology use in disrupted environments and worklife in the network-centric organization. In 2006, she received a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Dr. Mark has published in numerous conferences and journals including the CSCW, CHI, ECSCW, DIS, Group, and RE conferences and CSCW, CACM, and ISR journals. She was program chair for the ACM CSCW'06 and ACM Group'05 conferences and is on the editorial board of Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, and e-Service Qu@rterly.