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 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, 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” — 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 digital deception more broadly include current work about designing for deception online, including an analysis of video game elements and strategies to deceive children (with Nick Abegg and Apu Kapadia) as well as an exploration of the principles of fraud that guide dark patterns online (with Ritika Gairola and Colin Gray). 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: