• • Home
  • About
  • Contact
• • Undergrad
  • Masters
  • PhD
• • Staff
  • Research & Publications
• • News & Events
  • Current Students

Professor Dan Shapiro

Emeritus Professor

Degree: B.A. Psychology and Philosophy; MA

Research Interests

In common with most sociologists of my generation, my training was not originally in sociology. I studied philosophy and psychology at Oxford - where I was in my second year during the heady events of 1968 - and then worked abroad for a year before converting to sociology at Edinburgh, with a comparative study of television in Britain, France and Germany.

My first research post was in Aberdeen, studying the social impact of oil-related development in the North of Scotland, and working in the areas of peripheral development, the sociology of work, and the sociology of industrial relations. A jointly edited book based on this research The Social Impact of Oil in Scotland, came out in 1980.

After a year in a temporary teaching post back at Edinburgh, I came to a Lectureship at Lancaster in 1978. My first research interest here was to join colleagues in forming the Lancaster Regionalism Group, studying socio-spatial change. We undertook a project to show how shifts in Lancaster's social, economic and political relations were connected to its changing - deindustrialising - place in an increasingly global spatial division of labour, published as Localities, Class and Gender (Pion,1985). We subsequently carried out another study of Lancaster, adding in concerns with cultural and aesthetic changes in civil society and in the built environment, and with the independence of aspects of local social, economic and political restructuring. This was published as Restructuring: Place, Class and Gender (Sage, 1990).

From the mid 1980s I have, with other colleagues, been researching information technology and the social context of attempts to automate complex processes. Our premise was that computer systems often fail because their design does not take account of the social organisation of the work they are intended to support. Studies we have carried out in air traffic control and in the police have richly borne this out. A book, New Technology and Practical Police Work (Open University) was published in 1992, and there has also been a series of international conference and journal papers. That view also gained ground among some computer scientists, and gave rise to a new interdisciplinary area called 'CSCW' - Computer Support for Cooperative Work. I was the co-ordinator of a 7-nation EU Human Capital and Mobility Research Network on this topic, and we were also awarded a research grant under the ESRC "Cognitive Engineering" Research Programme, on "Ethnography in Support of Aesthetic Production" (a study of landscape architects). A large edited collection The Design of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware Systems was published by Elsevier Science in 1996. I continued my work on technology and aesthetic production in an EU ESPRIT project "DESARTE - The Design of Artefacts and Spaces" with partners in Austria and Denmark, studying and designing technology in architecture and landscape architecture.

Later, and with yet another group of colleagues, I researched cultural and economic transformations in the culture industries, focussing on television and the Internet. We were particularly interested in the balance between economic forces - shifts from fordism to postfordism - and cultural forces - shifts from modernism to postmodernism - in bringing about these transformations in 'modes of governance'. We were awarded a research grant under the ESRC "Media Culture and Media Economics" Research Programme, on "The Biographies of Cultural Products". In that project we studied the ways in which cultural objects flow globally from place to place and sector to sector, and the ways in which they change as they do so. We followed up this work in a project in the ESRC "Virtual Society?" Research Programme programme on "Silicon Alleys" - new formations of spaces, economic activities and labour processes around the confluence of technology, art, design and production in the 'enculturated economy'.

Returning to my interests in information systems, I took part with colleagues in a project on ambient computing to support the work of landscape architects, "WorkSPACE: Distributed Work support through component based SPAtial Computing Environments funded under the Disappearing Computer initiative of the EU IST Open Long Term Research programme. Through ethnographic studies, participatory design collaboration with professionals and aesthetic design strategies, the project successfully developed software components and hardware artefacts that may be combined and integrated into hybrid spatial computing environments in the office, on the move, and on site. We have followed this with a very large EU Integrated Project, PalCom: Making Computing Palpable, under the second phase of the Disappearing Computer initiative. Palpable computing is a new design initiative that envisions ubiquitous technologies that are designed to support people in making their actual and potential activities and affordances clearly available to their senses. Palpable systems support people in understanding what is going on at a level they choose and they support the user's control and choice. The project has developed an open architecture and a range of application prototypes, again with ethnography and participatory design playing a core role. A substantial number of papers have been published from these projects.

I am happy to consider proposals for research supervision in any of these research areas.

I speak French and German, which I learned at school and by living for about a year in each country. I live to the North and West of Lancaster, where my wife runs a small farm. We have two sons. I was a late convert to cycling and when I can find the time, and am not suffering the minor injuries and debilities of middle age, relish long hilly rides around the Lakes and Dales.

View on-line papers by author

View on-line papers by topic

Associated Keywords: Collaborative processes and methods, Communities of practice, Computing, Conversation analysis, Creative practice and technology, Culture and media, Cyberspace, Design, Digital technologies, Ethnography, Ethnomethodology, ICT, Information society, Information systems, Interdisciplinary collaboration, Material culture, New health technologies, New media, Participatory design, Phenomenology, Qualitative research methods, Science and technology studies, Sociology, Spatiality, Technologies, User involvement, Virtual reality

View all research activities, ePrints, news and events associated with Dan Shapiro.

«Back

Save this page: Del.icio.us Digg It Reddit Facebook Stumble It!