I am a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow in CoCreate, in the School of Design. My research lies in the area of digital health and wellbeing and personal informatics. I’m interested in how digital technologies can support people in managing their health and reach their wellness goals, being mindful of potentially negative consequences. I have a cross-disciplinary background and research interests in human-computer interaction, behaviour change, health informatics, personal tracking and the application of AI, with experience in design and clinical settings. I have been described as a designer, computer scientist, social scientist and ethnographic researcher. I enjoy undertaking and analysing qualitative, ethnographic research, as well as prototyping and evaluating digital systems. I completed my PhD, entitled “The Self-Tracker’s Journey: situated engagement and non-engagement with personal informatics systems over time” at the UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC), and I have previously worked in The Georgia Institute of Technology and Microsoft Research Cambridge.
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.
