I am trained as an Industrial Designer at the University of Technology Eindhoven and have professional experience in service design gained at Muzus (The Netherlands) and Policy Lab (UK). At university, I focused my development on designing for health and speculative design. I have had the honour to show much of my product design work to the public through exhibitions, and have worked for public-facing design events, exhibitions, and conferences. As well as conducting my PhD at Northumbria University, I work for ACM Interactions magazine as assistant to the editors in chief, working to give others a platform to show their work. My current research interest lays in how design-led approaches transform professional practices to drive projects; making them more human-centered and opening them up to embrace question-led instead of solution-focused approaches. In my PhD, I look into how design-research practices are used at ‘the boundaries between policy making and human-computer interaction’, and aim to introduce HCI-inspired design methods to policy making.
I am Professor of Digital Living in the School of Computer and Information Science. I study Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the design of interactive computational technologies. I'm particularly interested in design research methods and the ways in which technology design can be centred on rich understanding of user experiences, cultures and contexts.
I have previously held positions as Senior Lecturer of Experience-Centred Design and then Reader in Cultural Computing at Newcastle University, Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction in the Mixed Reality Lab and School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, and as a post-doc in the Socio-Digital Systems group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. My background is in Psychology (BSc) and Ergonomics (MSc) with a PhD in Computer Science. Over the years my work has been heavily influenced by the sociologists, philosophers and designers that I've collaborated with and consequently I take a design-led, social science orientation to understanding human experience and its application to the design of digital technologies. Accordingly, and although trained as an experimental scientist, my research is increasingly based on qualitative methods and design-research practices.
