I have a background in art, graphic and interaction design. I developed my craft-based practice at the London College of Communication before graduating from the Royal College of Art where I became interested in inclusive and participatory design. Since then, I have conducted participatory research with diverse groups where I used my expertise to design tools for co-creation. In my PhD, I explored the potential of craft and interactive technology for museums, and engaged the local community in the process of co-creating multisensory and digitally-augmented experiences of heritage. Alongside my research, I have been teaching workshops and design-led courses at the RCA, LCC and Sheffield Hallam University. I have also been developing exhibition and interactive design for cultural institutions such as the National Trust, English Heritage, Historic Royal Palaces. In 2015, I was awarded with “Ones to Watch, Rethinking Reality” by the Design Council and has also received funding such as grants from the Arts Council England to support my public engagement and exhibition work.
Current project website: https://intuitproject.org
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.
