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Research

Charlotte Lee's Research Group Archive

This page contains an archive of the past five years of Directed Research Groups led by Professor Lee. View her currently offered DRGs »

Spring 2025

Reading Group: "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology"

Directed by Charlotte P. Lee, Professor, HCDE

For this DRG we will be reading and discussing economic historian Chris Miller's book: "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology". The book  describes how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the US became dominant in chip design and manufacturing. It then goes on to explain global competition and collaboration in design and manufacturing.

In this DRG we will divide up the book to read one part per week. Participants are expected to do all the reading, attend meetings, and participate actively. Please note that while the book is long and there will be a lot of reading, it is accessible and engaging as it is written for the general public. There is also an excellent audio book that students may want to purchase as well.

Participants will take turns leading off discussion with a summary of the reading and a description of key figures and terms. Participants will be encouraged to occasionally contribute related media or academic articles for "show and tell" during the course of the quarter. At the end of the quarter students will turn in a 2-page paper and share it with the rest of the group.

Why are we reading this and who is this DRG for? The reason we are reading this is that I am pursuing new avenues for HCDE research and I need to commit a lot of this history to memory. In fact, I've already read this book once and found it engrossing. Now I am going to read it again and would love to have students to chat with about the book. This DRG is for students who are interested in learning about the history of the semiconductor industry, are interested in helping a professor get up to speed in a new area. As part of the DRG I will also share what I'm working on to connect the study of collaborative design with semiconductor manufacturing.

Autumn 2023

Reading Group for Sensemaking in Organizations

Directed by Charlotte P. Lee, Professor, HCDE

For this DRG we will be reading and discussing one book: Karl Weick's landmark book "Sensemaking in Organizations". Weick is a famous organizational theorist who took and takes an approach that is different from most organizational theorists. Rather than focusing on rational decision making, Weick focuses on how a process of ongoing sensemaking shapes what people do and how they do it in organizations. This work is more important than ever as we strive to understand the limits and opportunities of automation for a world increasingly dependent on AI/ML technologies.

In this DRG we will divide up the book to read one or two chapters per week culminating during week 10. Participants are expected to attend meetings and participate actively. In addition to the readings, participants will be encouraged to occasionally bring in related research papers, media articles, or examples from pop culture (e.g. films, video games) for "show and tell" during the course of the quarter. At the end of the quarter students will turn in a 2-page reflection paper.

The DRG will be for 1-3 units and will take place via Zoom on Monday at 3:30pm. PhD student schedules will be accommodated first, followed by MS students, followed by BS students. This DRG is at capacity for Autumn 2023 and no longer accepting applications.

Winter 2023

The Production of Astronomical Knowledge in the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)

We are seeking a small group of 2-4 doctoral, masters and/or undergraduate students interested in studying the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time. 

The Rubin Observatory in Chile is slated to come online next year and begin the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a wide angle, decade-long survey of the southern night sky. The LSST will leverage the largest digital camera ever created to produce what has been described as a 10-year long high definition video of the cosmos. This will give scientists the ability to track changes and movement over time, and in turn ask fundamental questions about the past and future of our solar system, the composition of the universe, and much more. The telescope will produce data of unprecedented size and speed, churning out 20 terabytes of raw data nightly and hundreds of petabytes of processed data over the course of the decade. Data releases will be made available broadly within the astronomy community at regular intervals, some nightly and some annually. 

The scale, immediacy, and openness of LSST data will ostensibly obviate many of the tradeoffs that characterized the preceding era of optical astronomy by sidestepping competition for access and observing time at scarce facilities. As such, LSST has the potential to democratize the field of astronomy by dramatically increasing access to astronomical data. At the same time, LSST data can only be made useful through the collaborative development and use of novel computational tools and techniques capable of handling the volume and velocity of data produced by the Rubin telescope. As such, the LSST has been imagined and structured as a convergent endeavor involving coordination and sense-making among astrophysicists, data scientists, and software engineers. 

This DRG will be jointly led by Dr. Anissa Tanweer, Research Scientist at the eScience Institute and Will Sutherland, PhD Candidate in HCDE, with supervision and guidance from Dr. Charlotte Lee of HCDE. Our own goal in this project is to better understand the negotiation of access in this new model of big data astronomy exemplified by the LSST. 

Students in this DRG will be part of exploratory research that will kick off longer-term ethnographic inquiry into the LSST project and the communities that support it. Some of the broad questions that may be of interest include: 

  • What does the role of software in analyzing LSST mean for who gets included in the production of astronomical knowledge?
  • How does LSST membership, access to LSST data, and access to software tools mediate the production of scientific knowledge across various kinds of teams, experts, and institutions?
  • How does the availability of LSST data open up new directions of inquiry in astronomy, and what are the implications for how the field—and society more broadly—come to understand the universe? 

We anticipate that students will benefit from the following opportunities in this DRG: 

  • Development of qualitative ethnographic research skills, including interviews, field observations, and/or documentary analysis
  • Exposure to theories about the organization of knowledge production
  • Window into the making of cutting-edge scientific research
  • Contribution to the early stages of planning for long term ethnographic research with the chance to influence the trajectory of that work
  • Possibility of longer-term collaborations

Winter 2022

Creative Reflections on Working During Covid Times

Directed by Charlotte P. Lee, Associate Professor

This studio-format DRG is meant to get your creative juices flowing by reflecting on being a human being trying to work during the Covid pandemic. By reflecting on the particulars of the emotional, practical, or social ease or difficulty of what we are doing during Covid, we learn about work, ourselves, and each other. Each week we will decide on a topic and a medium (e.g. “loss” and a photograph, or “masks” and haikus, “family” and a crayon drawing). No topic of medium will be mandatory but I asks students to try hard to stick with the program since what makes this special is the shared experience. Each meeting will begin with us sharing what we’ve made and then end with choice of the next prompt and medium. Your work does not need to be “good” it just needs to exist.

During week 10 we will each choose our favorite three products that we are willing to share and make our creative works (or digital versions of them) available to the public online.

This 1-credit CR/NC DRG will meet once a week starting week 3. We will meet via Zoom for most meetings. We may meet in-person at the end of quarter if there is a majority interest in doing so.

Spring 2021

Cooperatives and Sociotechnical Design

Directed by Scott Mainwaring, Affiliate Assistant Professor, HCDE
Co-Directed by Charlotte P. Lee, Associate Professor, HCDE

How can we design and develop technologies that foreground critical concerns of social justice and inclusion? There are no simple answers. One path forward is to take inspiration from the idea of cooperatives and cooperative principles. What traditions and histories can we draw upon for inspiration–and as cautionary tales? In this DRG, we will focus on cooperatives and cooperative principles, both inside and outside of technology domains. We will discuss what we find along the way and produce an annotated bibliography to help technology students and professionals learn about designing for (re)distribution of power, wealth, and knowledge. This is a large topic, with few scalable success stories, more than a few controversies and failures, but nevertheless powerful underlying ideas that have persisted since (at least) the 19th century. 

Cooperatives present an alternative to existing structures of capitalist exploitation and hierarchy, based on mutual aid and joint ownership. Cooperativism is a set of theories and principles (see the Seven Cooperative Principles) embodied to greater and lesser degrees in a wide range of practices, platforms, and companies, including:

Movements such as participatory design, citizen science, and platform cooperativism
Financial cooperatives such as credit unions, savings banks, and informal ROSCAs
Peer-production technology platforms like blockchain and wikis
Co-op businesses, member-owned (e.g., REI and PCC), worker-owned (e.g., WinCo Foods, Spain’s Mondragon), or citizen-owned (e.g., rural electric cooperatives and public utility districts)

This DRG will conduct exploratory research, to identify key concepts, questions, readings, and examples, as a 2-3 credit, active reading and discussion group, focused on key questions for HCDE researchers and designers. Each week students will read and write reflections on a primary reading, with one student taking the lead in presenting the reading, leading discussion, and drafting an annotation for bibliography deliverable. Secondary readings and examples will be explored throughout the quarter as well. For additional credit, students can produce materials to accompany the jointly produced annotated bibliography.