Bonnie Nardi facts for kids

Bonnie A. Nardi is a smart professor who used to teach at the University of California, Irvine. She worked in a field called Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This field studies how people use and interact with computers and technology. She also led a research lab that looked at how people work together using computers.

Professor Nardi is well-known for her studies on how people use technology. She researched things like games, social media, and how society and technology connect. In 2013, she was chosen for the ACM CHI academy, which is a big honor in her field. She retired from teaching in 2018.

Bonnie Nardi's Career

Before becoming a professor, Bonnie Nardi worked at big tech companies. These included AT&T Labs, Agilent, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple labs. She was one of the first anthropologists hired by these companies. Anthropologists study human behavior and culture. Companies hired her to understand how people used their products at home and in offices.

Understanding Technology with Activity Theory

Bonnie Nardi worked with Victor Kaptelinin on two books. These books are Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design (2009) and Activity Theory in HCI: Fundamentals and Reflections (2012). These books explain something called activity theory. This theory helps us understand how we use tools and technology in our daily lives. It gives a way to think about our relationship with technology.

Research and Interests

Professor Nardi's main interests are in human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. This means she studies how people interact with computers and how they work together using technology. She is especially interested in activity theory and how people communicate using computers. She also studies how to design technology better.

Studying Online Worlds

Nardi researched how people use CSCW applications and blogs. She was also a pioneer in studying the popular online game World of Warcraft in the field of HCI. She looked at how people use technology in many different places. These include offices, hospitals, schools, libraries, and laboratories. You can find more about her work on her website here.

Helping Librarians

Many librarians know Bonnie Nardi for a chapter in her book Information Ecologies. This chapter talked about librarians as "keystone species" in information systems. This means she saw librarians as very important for how information flows. Her book even inspired a conference in the UK. She also gave a speech at the Library of Congress in 1998 about library services in the digital age. She wrote Information Ecologies while working at AT&T Labs Research.

Activity Theory Explained

Bonnie Nardi describes her main way of thinking as "activity theory". This is also known as Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). It's a way of understanding how people learn and act. It was developed by Russian psychologists like Vygotsky, Luria, and Leont'ev. She says her interests include designing user interfaces, working together with computers, and using theories to design and check technology.

Researching Online Games

In 2010, Bonnie Nardi received a grant to study World of Warcraft. This grant helped her "analyze and understand the ways in which players... engage in creative collaboration." Her research looked at how players work together in this popular online game.

One of her most famous books about World of Warcraft is My Life as a Night Elf Priest. This book is an ethnography, which means it's a study of a culture, in this case, the culture of online gamers.

Education and Background

Bonnie Nardi earned her first degree from the University of California at Berkeley. She then received her PhD from the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. After her PhD, she spent a year in Western Samoa doing more research.

See also

• Digital anthropology
• Information ecology
• Digital library
• Digital librarian
• Lucy Suchman
• Terry Winograd
• Mark Weiser
• Paul Dourish