My work as an artist, researcher and educator is based within Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Interaction Design (ID) and the Media Arts and Creative Technology arena. Within this context much of the work I am involved with, in respect of research and teaching, is based within the arena of applied technology. That is, taking design, and technology theory, and applying them in creative contexts. Using the ideas of Research through Design (Sas et al 2014, Frankel and Racine 2010, Zimmerman et al 2010, https://www.researchthroughdesign.org) to situate teaching, research and making as complementary activities in enquiry based learning.
This idea that we are in an experiential situation, that of learning by doing, in an enquiry led learning context is central to my approach to the activities of learning and teaching. Not only is this approach supported within an education theory context (Biesta 2014) it is also a significant part of a contemporary HCI and interaction design approach, particularly in methodologies such as Participatory Design and stakeholder orientated approaches. (Simonsen and Robertsen 2012).
This combination of theory and practice, combined as a coherent approach, with educational, research and industrial theory, approaches and techniques complementing each other is reflected within my work as a Learning and Teaching Fellow of University of West of England and at other institutions across the world where I am a visiting lecturer, external examiner or supervisor.
There are three recurrent themes within my current practice as an educator, researcher and practitioner.
- grounding student identity within a community of practice
- learning as an experiential process
- research and practice combined as exemplar activity
I am currently Professor of Interaction Design researching Future Creativity at CODE University of Applied Sciences in Berlin.
Recent Taught Courses include;
Undergraduate Courses
Level 1 Bachelor
- Introduction to Web Platforms. 2008-2012
- Web Design Studio. 2012-2018
University of the West of England
Level 2 Bachelor
- Web Design Principles. 2009-2013
University of the West of England - Media, Business and Publishing. 2010-2012
University of the West of England - Data, Schemas and Applications. 2008-2010
University of the West of England
Level 3 Bachelor
- Multimedia Systems. 2010-2012
University of the West of England - Web Games Programming. 2012- 2014
SHAPE/Hong Kong Design Institute - Interaction Design. 2012-
SHAPE/Hong Kong Design Institute & University of the West of England
Selected Bachelor Dissertation Supervisions
- ‘Exploration of the raw form of Website Design’ Paris. 2015
- ‘Strava Data Visualisations with a custom Plugin system’ Short. 2016
- ‘Can peer to peer travel improve cohesion within the parkour community’ Downey. 2016
- ‘Platonic Reality – Educational and interactive tutorial app with Augmented/Virtual Reality’ Reed. 2017
- ‘Designing Shared workspaces in Virtual Reality’ Dawson. 2017
Post Graduate Courses
- Interaction Design Project. 2015-17
- Mobile Systems 2014-17
University of Amsterdam - Interactive Intelligent Systems. 2014-17
University of Amsterdam - Creative Technology Toolkit. 2018-
University of West of England - Creative Technology Research and Practice. 2018-
University of West of England - Digital Connections. 2018-
University of West of England - Generative Systems for Art and Design
Selected Master Dissertation Supervisions
- ‘Use of Smartphone Devices to Stimulate Social Interactions’ Chronopoulos. 2014
- ‘Improving quality of medical reports with gamification’ Martinez-Ugaz. 2014
- ‘A Multimedia Application for Students to Reflect on their University Time’ Brophy. 2014
- ‘A study into air-gesture based interaction with home objects’ Waanders. 2015
- ‘Encouraging healthy groceries through the evaluation of shopping cart contents’ Bernadini. 2015
- ‘An Alternative Representation of The Visualization of Pedometer Sensor Data’ Winands. 2015
- ‘A small study on real-time language translation and its contribution to language learning’ Janssen. 2015
- ‘Multi-device experience design: supporting an equal flow of fantasy sport platforms played on different devices’
- ‘Audio clip association to textual data: Children’s audiobooks’ Flint. 2016
- ‘Sensing emotion with force sensitive touch screens’ Blom. 2017
- ‘Better Content Accessibility on Connected TV through Online Field Experiments’ Klomp. 2017
- ‘Towards a persuasive system to improve the driving behavior of truck drivers’ Arnoldussen. 2017
- ‘How Does the Complexity of Game Mechanics Affect the Understanding of the Gameplay in Serious Games’ Singh. 2017
- ‘Information Needs for a Wayfinding App for Low VisionVisually Impaired Persons’ van Swieten 2017
Doctoral Courses
- Research Methods for Design (IADE Portugal)
References
Biesta, G.J.J. (2014). The beautiful risk of education. Boulder, Co: Paradigm Publishers. ISBN: 978-1-61205-026-3
Frankel, L. & Racine, M., 2010. The Complex Field of Research: for Design, through Design, and about Design. Design Research Society.
Sas, C. et al., 2014. Generating Implications for Design Through Design Research. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI ’14. New York, NY, USA: ACM, pp. 1971–1980. Available at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2556288.2557357.
Simonsen, J. & Robertson, T., 2012. Routledge international handbook of participatory design J. Simonsen & T. Robertson, eds., Routledge International.
Zimmerman, J., Stolterman, E. & Forlizzi, J., 2010. An Analysis and Critique of Research through Design: towards a formalization of a research approach. Proc. DIS 2010, pp.310–319