Rethinking ownership in the digital age | Siân Lindley | TEDxEastEnd
(2015) When George Orwell wrote 1984, there was nothing simpler than the idea of owning a paperback book. The more the digital world he foreshadowed becomes real, the more complex the idea of ownership becomes. Do you own your digital books? Your photographs? What about your friends’ comments on them? Siân Lindley explores how we need to re-imagine our files and how we interact with them.
Siân explores new experiences with computing, from amplifying effectiveness to creating delight and wonder. Her research on technologies in use and the everyday practices that are built up around them is underpinned by processes of design, making, and social science. She does this in collaboration with the Human Experience & Design group.
Her recent work explores how people manage and keep the digital content they care about, whether they feel a sense of ownership of it, and how this is changing in a landscape of Cloud computing, Web 2.0, and operating systems that hide folder hierarchies away. Part of this research entails considering how the actions that digital content support can be redesigned to support a stronger sense of possession.
Siân has a PhD in Psychology from the University of York and an MSc in Human-Centred Computing Systems from the University of Sussex. She has worked at Microsoft Research since 2007. She took part in the BBC’s 100 Women conference in 2013.
