I am a doctoral researcher based on the School of Design at Northumbria University, working on an AHRC funded National Productivity Investment Fund studentship. After more than a decade working in the user experience industry, I started a PhD in October 2017 working with John Vines, Lars Erik Holmquist, and Rachel Clarke (all at Northumbria) and Dorothy Liviabella from the Vulnerable Customers team at Santander UK. My research aims to explore new possibilities for digital money through participatory design with older adults.
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.
