School of Information doctoral student Elisa Oreglia was honored with the Best Short Paper award at the 2010 Mobile CHI conference.
The 12th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI) was held September 7–10 in Lisbon, Portugal. The award-winning paper, “Social Practices and Mobile Phone Use of Young Migrant Workers,” was co-authored by Oreglia along with Xueming Lang and Suzanne Thomas (both of Intel Corporation).
The paper explores technology adoption in emerging markets, based on ethnographic studies of the social practices and technology use of young migrant workers in China. The researchers report that the migrant workers' social practices were the primary driver for their mobile phone adoption and use; based on these findings, they discuss several design directions for making mobile phones play a greater role in social practices.
Oreglia's current research focuses on young rural-to-urban migrant Chinese women and on their ties with their places and families of origin. These women often leave their villages for the the economic opportunity of the city, where they are exposed to new patterns of technology consumption. She is currently conducting fieldwork for her dissertation in Beijing and in the countryside of the Hebei and Shandong Provinces.
