Judith Donath - Technology, trust, and what holds society together
Judith Donath is a design thinker for some of the most important theory for how people interact in online spaces, drawing on evolutionary biology, architecture, ethnography, cognitive science, and various other disciplines. She just might be the voice we need for the world we're walking into, one that crosses in-person and online boundaries and must understand interactions across media.
In addition to being a designer, she is also a celebrated visual artist and writer. Judith is a faculty fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and the former director of the MIT Media Lab's Sociable Media Group, where she and her students designed innovative interfaces for online communities.
Her and her students' work examining the future of identity, privacy and mediated life have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Judith's work about social media, AI, ethics and anonymity has been published widely in scientific journals. She is the author of what should be considered The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online, foundational reading for anyone attempting to understand or design for interactions online.
For decades, she has been breaking the boundaries of the thinking about how we interact online and design spaces for that interaction and there are very few voices more important to our hybrid and transitional in-person/online world.
Now she is working on a new book -- The Cost of Honesty -- about technology, trust and deception.
She received her doctoral and master's degrees in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT and her bachelor's degree in History from Yale University.
There is very little that Judith does or thinks or writes about that I don't find fascinating, important, and frontier and I'm delighted to bring her singular voice to the Origins Podcast.