Design (or refine) logo for the CMU Social Computing Lab

Social Computing Lab @ Carnegie Mellon

Your work will become the logo for the Social Computing Lab at CMU, a leading research lab studying how people collaborate online to produce knowledge, play together, build relationships, and solve problems. Over the past several years the lab has produced dozens of publications in top journals and conferences, multiple best paper awards, has been funded by several NSF, NIH, and other grants, and has been cited many times in the press ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Technology Review to Slashdot. For more details please see the personal pages of the lab founders at http://kittur.org, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kraut/, and http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dabbish/

Our work focuses on building a science of online communities. Online communities are the fastest-growing portion of the Internet and provide members with information, social support, and entertainment. While a minority, such as Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook and the Apache Server project are highly successful, many others fail. Despite the occasional success, designing online communities remains largely trial and error. Our lab conducts empirical studies of how online communities operate and builds intelligent interfaces to augment those communities. We are developing theory to understand behavior in online communities and theory-based guidelines for designing these communities.

Our target audience includes prospective students, funding agencies, companies, other research labs, the press, and the general public.

We want a clean and modern logo that expresses the idea of "social computing" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_computing), e.g., the idea that many people computing together can achieve more individuals working alone. This logo will be used to define the web presence of our lab.

Included is our current logo, which we like but feel is too busy and not refined enough. Refinements of the existing logo concept or new concepts entirely are both welcome. The current logo aims to reflect the idea of humans interacting as computing elements; while this is an example of a direction we like, you should feel free to be creative.

In terms of words, "Social Computing Lab" is ideal, but just "Social Computing" would be acceptable too. In both cases incorporating "Carnegie Mellon" is also important in order to show our affiliation. What you can do with the "Carnegie Mellon" font is, unfortunately, rather constrained (see http://www.cmu.edu/identity/id_basics.html).

We will require an Illustrator (.ai) file as output.