Based at UC Irvine, this center involved academic partners from NYU, Cornell, Georgia Tech, and Indiana University.

[11] At UC Irvine, Dourish is also a member of: Along with being a member of the aforementioned organizations, Dourish is a "co-conspirator" in the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction, a faculty associate of the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations, and a co-coordinator of the People and Practices PAPR@UCI initiative.

[12] Dourish won the Diana Forsythe Prize in 2002, and the IBM Faculty Award in 2006 under the American Medical Informatics Association.

Dourish recently received a $201,000 grant to conduct research on people's online participation in social movements.

Dourish recently received a $400,000 grant to research how the creative design process works when a team is split up through different cultures.

Dourish also recently received a $247,000 grant to research how social media ties into death in real life.

Dourish combines this technical research with sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies in an effort that he calls "embodied interaction."

One of Dourish's most recognized contributions has been bringing sociological and phenomenological understandings of human activity to the design of technological systems.

For example, his work on spatiality in virtual worlds and computer mediated communication has emphasized how people—in interaction with systems and with one another—evolve new understandings of space, media, and relationships.

The new experience also helped to challenge current technological practices by showing the assumptions made in familiar settings.

Dourish is interested and intrigued by opportunities presented through design as potential means of ethnographic engagement.

Through a series of case studies, featuring digital artifacts and practices such as emulation, spreadsheets, databases, and computer networks, he connects the representation of information to broader issues of human experience, touching on “questions of power, policy, and polity in the realm of the digital.

Dourish's Socian Analysis of Computerization class focuses on how the internet, information, and technology affect our everyday lives.