I am an interdisciplinary designer and PhD student, currently working with women living with HIV in the UK to explore identity and use of digital technologies. My research interests focus on new ways to both research and express information normally restricted by social constructions of communication and expression. This has included work on topics including personal identity, online informational privacy, visual communication design, cultural heritage, interactive narratives, feminism, and stigma. I completed my Bachelor of Design in Fashion Communications at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, and my Master of Arts in Design Informatics at the Edinburgh College of Art in Edinburgh, UK.
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.
