Themes
Interdisciplinary user-centred approach to understanding and designing for interactions between people and technologies in everyday contexts... particular interest in opportunities enabled by pervasive/ubiquitous sensors, wireless networks, tangibles and handhelds... 'real world' deployments... reflected on to evolve theories and methods.
Video Games & Usability
Description coming
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Health records & health IT
We are interested in all things health-IT related. We are currently looking at clinician's use of free and coded text in patient records. We also have interests in telecare, assistive technology, pervasive health and rehabilitation technologies.
Growing Old: Having Fun, Staying Connected
Aging populations are creating an imperative to explore pervasive technologies for supporting care in people's homes. We are interested in telecare and ambient assisted living environments. We also explore opportunities for the same technologies to support quality of life through games, leisure activities and social connectivity. Experience with these will empower people when using the same technologies for telecare.
Accessibility
TBD
Ubiquitous Domestic Environments
New technologies offer opportunities beyond usual 'smart home' scenarios but it's not clear yet what these might be. We studied local households to find out how consumer technologies come to be in people's homes and what we can learn from current experiences. We are also working with these households to develop design ideas for future 'smart' technologies they really want to live with.
Creativity and Embodied Interaction
Art and technology come together to create interactive devices for experiences such as installations for exhibitions exploiting aspects such as touch, breath, sway, and sound. We also support self-expression for complexly disabled people through video and games. Through these we also develop more principled design understandings, drawing on literatures such as embodied interaction and enactive perception.
Social interaction & social networks
We are intersted in current social networkign trends, especially for what these mean in terms of identity and self presentation. Past projects have involved collaborative, public and private displays for planning, creating and socialising draw upon external cognition to help create usable and useful shared and individual-use displays. We are also intersted in the ways in which people think about their social network and organise social communication and contacts on-line.
Pervasive learning & participatory science
Our current proejct is looking escience usability and taking a 'p-science' approach! Previously we have built a pervasive infrastructure in the gardens at Chawton House for creating novel interactive experiences for school children where they engage in diverse activities in the grounds to gather inspiration for their story writing. Simulating GRID-based infrastructures, we have conducted projects with school children using sensor based data collected remotely by scientists, as well as by themselves, to support their understanding of their environment.
