DEPARTMENTS OF PSYCHOLOGY AND COMPUTER SCIENCE
I'm a senior research associate at UCLIC. I am currently working on the project Healthy Interactive Systems in Healthcare and teaching HCI courses in Psychology and Language Sciences and Computer Science. I received my PhD from University College London in 2005.
My research interests lie in the area of information interaction and how this relates to the design of information technologies. I'm particularly interested in the way that people seek, manipulate and use information in particular contexts (for example journalists and lawyers) and understanding how this relates to the design of technologies to support them. This is a subject which spans both Human Computer Interaction and Information Science. My methods are mainly field-based, qualitative and inductive, although I have been known test the odd hypothesis.
Recently I have become interested in sensemaking as a concern for technology design. Sensemaking is what happens when someone says, "That makes sense" and what fails when someone says "That makes no sense at all!". It is a process through which people structure their experience to form an integrated view about something. It provides the essential link between a fragmented and confusing world of information (data, stimuli etc.) and the formulation of responsive action (e.g. deciding, creating, communicating, etc.). Sensemaking does this by accessing and using information in the interests of constructing interpretation - a representation of the meaning behind information. Like the information that people think will help them, the kind of sense people need to construct is contextually bound in terms of situation, interests and background knowledge. The question, then, for people concerned with designing for information access and delivery and activities such as manipulation, reflection, sharing and storage, is how to design in a way that best enables people to make sense out of information in particular contexts.
See my publications.
University College London Interaction Centre
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