Meet C-Lab

Overseen by PI Christena Nippert-Eng, Ph.D. Professor of Informatics, Indiana University Bloomington

At C-Lab, we conduct bold, original, concept-driven research to shine new light on the familiar – revealing the often hidden, yet unmistakable logics behind everyday interactions.  We focus on social behavior and socio-technical systems, using quantitative and qualitative fieldwork techniques (especially interviewing and direct observation) to contribute to empirical knowledge, scholarly theory, and user-centered design.  Our lab works across diverse domains, including the intersections of computing, culture, and society; privacy and security; human-computer interaction; and animal-computer interaction.  Our non-proprietary work is published in top conference proceedings like CSCW, CHI, CHIPLAY, HRI, and ACI, as well as in a variety of journals, scholarly monographs, and commercial nonfiction books.

C-Lab researchers learn to delve deeply into shared, cultural concepts —e.g., “home”, “work”, “privacy”, “secrecy”, “camouflage”, “choice”, “deception”, and “misinformation”— to explore how a given concept appears in and is shaped by individuals’ every day, visible behaviors, especially those that are mediated by computing technologies.  We use a highly focused analytical lens, and a rigorous, creative approach to acquiring and analyzing data throughout the phases of our research.

Our lab currently focuses largely on camouflage—looking across species, the face-to-face, and the digital realms to better understand the wide swaths of behaviors encompassed by this concept.  To date, targeted projects on information and deception include work with Brian Pleasants Harper and Bryce Greene that disambiguates the emergent uses of a set of misinformation terms (misinfo, disinfo, propaganda, fake news, conspiracy theories) by the top five US daily newspapers over the last 38 years as well as the top three cable news services (CNN, FOX, MSNBC) during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Current work on digital deception more broadly includes research on design and deception, including an analysis of interviews with teen gamers and the social and game elements that normalize harm to children (with Ritika Gairola, Nick Abegg and Apu Kapadia) and a project on the regulatory challenges associated with children’s conceptualizations and expectations for privacy with social robots in the home (with Leigh Levenson and Nick Abegg). Past work has focused on online gamers’ use of camouflage techniques; mid-career professionals’ experiences of and knowledge about workplace phishing, and deception including catfishing in online dating (with Anne C. Tally, Jacob Abbott, Sanchari Das, Katreen Boustani, Ashley Bochner, and Yu Ra Kim).

To date, our lab has included these brilliant, hard-working researchers: