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Empower Research Lab

About Us

What we do

Our lab does research in human-centered design, human-computer/machine interaction, personal informatics, ubiquitous computing, and social computing. Our high-level goal is to develop interactive technologies that promote personal and planetary welfare. Our research style blends creativity, innovation, and critical reflection with practical application and translational implementation.

We undertake projects that focus on advancing various aspects of this process, to:

  • increase our fundamental scientific understanding about human behaviors and lived experiences with respect to a given domain of interest
  • use such insights to inform the design of novel systems that aim to improve targeted outcomes
  • build and deploy these tools to study the impact in real-world settings and scenarios

This iterative, “full stack” strategy enhances our ability to assess the merit, feasibility, and efficacy of an envisioned system, while foregrounding a deep empathy for the role of technology in a given context. This also means our research is inherentlyinterdisciplinary, integrating perspectives and techniques from both technical and humanistic fields. In these ways, we strive to make empirical, methodological, technical, and theoretical contributions.

Overall, our projects span multiple domains, methods, people, contexts, and interaction paradigms. While not an exhaustive set, each project is tagged to reflectwhat problemsit targets and which sociotechnical approaches we employ to develop solutions, as well as who might use or be impacted by such engineered technologies, where that technology would be used, and how people will interactwith and through the technology.

Lab space

We are located in the ECSC building at 15 Thayer Drive, Hanover, NH 03755. Our lab is in the design corridor on the ground floor, room 026, as shown in the floorplan. More info about the ECSC building is available here.

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Murnane Research Group at Dartmouth College  |  Contact: emurnane@dartmouth.edu  |  Last updated: December 2023 | Login

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