I have engaged in a number of design research activities and professional design practices in several countries (Japan, UK, the Netherlands and Denmark), focusing on the perceptive interaction between humans and artefacts. My PhD investigated the industrial designer’s cognitive activities within the processes of idea generation, focusing on how reduced and incomplete information provides stimuli and can beneficially impact upon the designers’ creative reasoning. I have been working in CoCreate on a project on the design of new services and systems to help people understand and manage experiences of fatigue.
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.
