Jonah Brucker-Cohen

Bio

Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a researcher, artist, and Ph.D. candidate in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin. His work and thesis focuses on the theme of "Deconstructing Networks" which includes projects that attempt to critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience. He received his Masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1999 and since 2003 he has co-led the "Scrapyard Challenge Workshops" with Katherine Moriwaki which have been held in over 14 countries across the 5 continents of Europe, South America, North America, Asia,and Australia. His work has been shown at events and museums such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (2008), Museum of Modern Art (MOMA - NYC)(2008), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (04), Whitney Museum of American Art's ArtPort (03), Ars Electronica (02,04,08), ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art (04-5), Dutch Electronic Art Festival (03,04), Art Futura (04), SIGGRAPH (00,05), ISEA (02,04,06), Chelsea Art Museum (08) and others.

Abstract

Digital communication tools are a critical component of everyday life for many people. The appropriate and inappropriate design of communication tools influence and shape how we connect, interact and collaborate in local and distributed groups. Many of the digital communication tools we use arose organically; with no explicit understanding of the complex and multi-faceted effects they have on human behaviour. For example mailing lists emerged more than 30+ years ago, yet the social experience of mailing lists has remained nearly unchanged, e.g. mailing lists do not exist that are designed to explicitly support business processes.

THWONK is an ongoing collaborative project started in 2009 by Mike Bennett and Jonah Brucker-Cohen in the interdisciplinary research fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). CMC is concerned with the design and study of online and digital communication tools, such as email, instant messaging, text messaging, social networks, and Twitter. THWONK is a free online website, authoring application and infrastructure for crowd-sourcing and simplifying the creation and rapid prototyping of novel CMC systems, such that non-technical users can quickly invent, explore and co-create novel CMC systems. Our purpose with THWONK is to shed new light on possible CMC designs. The second important aim is to simplify the process of CMC implementation and research.