Paul Dourish

Dourish’s recent work has dealt with information technology use in trans-national and trans-cultural contexts. For example, his work on postcolonial computing has tried to unpack how assumptions about technology and knowledge drawn from Western or industrialized nation experiences create shape (or misshape) technology design. In the process, he has worked with indigenous Australian people, Chinese gamers, mobility between Thailand and the USA, and Indian people regarding IT design. Dourish and his team were drawn by these new settings to dismiss the presumption that "everyone is or wants to be just like us". The new experience also helped to challenge current technological practices by showing the assumptions made in familiar settings.

In 2015 he was named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions in social computing and human-computer interaction."

One of Dourish's most recognized contributions has been bringing sociological and phenomenological understandings of human activity to the design of technological systems. For example, his work on spatiality in virtual worlds and computer mediated communication has emphasized how people—in interaction with systems and with one another—evolve new understandings of space, media, and relationships. He also drew on Schutzian phenomenology to argue that tangible computing and social computing share an underlying emphasis on people as embodied, social actors. Emphasizing people as social and embodied points to the importance of how individuals are constituted through their interactions and movements in space with other people. This model is counterposed to models of the person in Human-Computer Interaction that focus exclusively on people's cognitive capabilities.

His third book, "The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information,” explores the “material arrangements” of various digital objects—that is, how information is represented and interpreted. Through a series of case studies, featuring digital artifacts and practices such as emulation, spreadsheets, databases, and computer networks, he connects the representation of information to broader issues of human experience, touching on “questions of power, policy, and polity in the realm of the digital.” The book was published by MIT Press in 2017.

His second book, "Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing," written in collaboration with Genevieve Bell, is an exploration of the social and cultural aspects of ubiquitous computing, with a particular focus on the disciplinary and methodological issues that have shaped the ubiquitous computing research agenda. It was published by MIT Press in 2011.

In 2008, he was elected to the CHI Academy in recognition of his contributions to Human-Computer Interaction. Dourish won the Diana Forsythe Prize in 2002, and the BM Faculty Award in 2006 under the American Medical Informatics Association. He was also awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2002. Dourish recently received a $201,000 grant to conduct research on people's online participation in social movements. Dourish recently received a $400,000 grant to research how the creative design process works when a team is split up through different cultures. Dourish also recently received a $247,000 grant to research how social media ties into death in real life.

At UC Irvine, he is a teaching professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences department, where he is a member of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction (LUCI), and in the interdisciplinary graduate program in Arts Computation Engineering. In addition to his appointment in Informatics, he has courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Anthropology. From 2004-2006, he was Associate Director at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

Dourish has published three books. He published "Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction" (MIT Press) in 2001. This book explores the relationship between phenomenological sociology and interaction design, particularly with reference to physically embodied computation and ubiquitous computing. He proposes Tangible computing and Social computing as two different aspects of the same program of investigation, named embodiment.

In 2000, Dourish moved to Southern California, when he joined the faculty at the University of California, Irvine. Since then, he has remained a full professor of Informatics while being involved in some organizations. He has taught a number of students working in academia and industry.

Born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland, Dourish studied at St Aloysius' College. He then received a B.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1989. He moved five years later to work at Rank Xerox EuroPARC (later the Xerox Research Center Europe) in Cambridge, UK, where he completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science at University College London (UCL).

Paul Dourish (born 1966) is a computer scientist best known for his work and research at the intersection of computer science and social science. Born in Scotland, he is a professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where he joined the faculty in 2000. He is a Fellow of the ACM, and winner of the CSCW 2016 "Lasting Impact" award. Dourish has published three books and over 100 scientific articles, and holds 19 US patents.