This research strand of CIM considers how contemporary digital technologies are used and applied in everyday life, but also as tools for doing research. We are specifically interested in data production and visualisation, agency, mobility, navigation, cognition, perception, performativity, governance, economic valorisation and decision-making. Interfaces are central to this research theme as the means through which such applications ‘work’. We critically explore what interfaces obscure and foreground when applications are used. We use the concept of gestures as a lens to investigate how media technologies invite us to engage with them in various ways, which may not always be – or appear to be – causal and can also go beyond language. Gestures are approached in terms of the haptic and multi-sensory, immediacy, habit, affect and tactics.

Members of CIM are involved in different approaches to the study applications, interfaces and gestures, including:

1. Apps. Analyzing the political economy of apps, socio-technical relationships of apps with other platforms and various devices, protocological power, affect and behavior, embodiment and context, design patterns and methods (Dr Michael Dieter).
2. Dashboards​. Investigating dashboards as the default format for the conscious engagement with big data. Topics include: ​Decision-making, cognition, perception, design, user research and behavioural modelling, performance management, business intelligence, governance and organisational change (Dr Nate Tkacz).
3. Digital cartographies. Examining how digital mapping interfaces have changed navigation by putting the user in the map and by enabling a mutable image through an accelerated network of immutable mobile. Analyzing how as sense of immediacy is produced through a seemingly merging landscape and map when users physically engage with interfaces (Dr Sybille Lammes).
4. Ludic interfaces. Investigating how HCI interfaces augment and extend playfulness through their interactive transformability, bringing play into the distributed and networked space-times of apllications (Dr Sybille Lammes).
5. Interface methods. Considering how interfaces can be used in social and cultural research (Professor Celia Lury).
6. Collaboration. Exploring how communities of data analysts can collaborate via software interfaces and repositories (Dr Greg McInerny).