Opening Plenary: Arranging to Do Things With Others

Tuesday, 9:00 am - 10:30 am

Herbert H. Clark, Stanford University

Much of what we do we do with other people. We conduct business, gossip, play games, and take classes with others, both in person and through computers. Joint activities like these are advanced through sequences of brief joint actions. The problem is this: it takes delicate coordination against the common ground of the participants to initiate such actions. Person A has to arrange for person B (1) to commit to taking part (2) in a particular joint action (3) in a particular role (4) at a particular time and place. I will argue that people have principled ways of solving this problem, and that designers can and should leverage these principles when supporting these activities through computers and other technologies.

Clark is a professor of psychology at Stanford University. He has long been interested in the social foundations of language use. With colleagues, he has worked on such issues as common ground, collaboration in reference, linguistic and nonlinguistic forms of signaling, joint projects in discourse, and disfluences in spontaneous speech. Clark earned his BA at Stanford and his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins and taught at Carnegie-Mellon before going to Stanford. He is the author of over 100 published papers and chapters, co-author with Eve V. Clark of Psychology and Language (HBJ, 1977), and the author of Arenas of Language Use (Chicago Univesity Press, 1992) and Using Language (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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