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; 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 include work about online gamers, workplace phishing, and catfishing in online dating, led by recently graduated PhD, Dr. Anne C. Tally.

New projects started in Spring 2023 include “Choice and Control:  The Influence of Design on Zoo Animal Behavior” with Lisa Brey, Eli McGraw, Isha Mahajan, Lilli Hassinger, and Dane Smith; “Designing Robots with Children’s Privacy Rights in Mind” with Leigh Levinson and Selma Sabanovic, and, funded by a gift from Microsoft, “Boundary Work and Technology Use Among Guatemalan Women Microentrepreneurs,” with Anne C. Tally, Katreen Boustani, Andrea Echeverria, Gustavo Fernandez, Lucy Lemus, and Oscar Lemus.

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