I am an artist and designer conducting a PhD study into the political economy of social innovation, with an emphasis on grass roots activism and the emerging digital economy. I am lucky enough to have had a diverse experience of industrial, communication, transport and service design. I have ran a design consultancy since 2012, built the UK’s first hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, and have been involved in numerous political and community activist projects. In 2017 I was awarded the Foulis award by the Glasgow School of Art for design research into global civics. I am currently researching a crowdfunding campaign to develop a community bakery, and a community action research project on a rural Scottish Island, using design fiction to evoke responses to long term challenges.
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.
