Elias Greendorfer is a Ph.D. student at the iSchool.

When you meet someone who doesn’t know about your research, how do you describe it? 

I tend to think of myself as a researcher with interests in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. While I consider myself a designer, I also draw heavily on ideas from the humanities and social sciences. In particular, I am fascinated by rites of passage. I am very interested in the idea of liminality, or what it means to be between things, places or times, and how liminal space and thinking can be operationalized within the context of design.

Who is the faculty member working closest with you? What are you learning from them?

I am working most closely with Batya Friedman and David Hendry in the Value Sensitive Design Lab. While I am certainly learning from them in different ways, I feel particularly lucky to have the opportunity to learn from them as a two-person team. I think this cooperative example sets an exciting precedent for all the other work we do both in the lab as well as in the wild. That is, from them I am reminded not only of the power of teamwork but how to think creatively as a team during each part of a research project.

Why are you interested in this subject?

Information science seems to offer a very wonderful and broad set of theories and methods with which I can bring my seemingly disparate research interests together. As a fine artist, I have always been interested in the process. Liminality allows me to sort of stop the process and look at it up close. I think there is a remarkable opportunity to understand something very human there. Indeed, I think my main interest is to come to some appreciation of what is most human in "Human-Computer Interaction.”

What impact do you hope to make in the information field through your research/dissertation?

While I do hope to contribute to the information field, what I am most excited about is actually bringing what information science has to offer to other academic contexts. For instance, I think that much of the thinking of information science would find a wonderful home within arts education or more design-oriented institutions.

What surprised you the most when digging into your research?

It is just amazing to me how willing people are to talk to you when you share a little bit about your work. I thought for sure that people would turn away from deeply abstract ideas like liminality. On the contrary! It seems people only want to know more and think together through the research process.

What are your career goals once you graduate?

My experiences in the Information School have reminded me how much I love teaching. After graduating, I hope to find myself in a teaching institution. Who knows, maybe also start an independent design practice on the side!