Research

My research interests lie at the intersection of technological and social concerns and the use of novel technologies—and novel uses of more mundane technologies—in social contexts. In particular, I am interested in the use of technology for the benefit of communities and the use of large, public displays in social spaces. This has been the subject of my PhD, which has concentrated on the use of public displays to support a rural community by sharing community-generated content.

I’m funded by a Microsoft Research European PhD Scholarship and supervised by Keith Cheverst and Mark Rouncefield.

Projects

Supporting Village Community Through Connected Situated Displays

My PhD project builds upon the findings from CASIDE and the Wray Photo Display, which indicated that situated displays showed great promise as a means of supporting rural communities. The project is primarily concerned with continuing, eventually leading to the development of WrayDisplay, a system that supported event listings and advertisements in addition to photos, and with evaluating the use of participatory, prototype-driven methods for developing community displays.

CASIDE: Investigating Cooperative Applications in Situated Display Environments

CASIDE was an EPSRC-funded project which I worked on for three months developing the Wray Photo Display prototype for deployment in a local community. I later evaluated and redesigned this display as a masters project.

This was one of numerous situated displays systems developed as part of the project: another was Hermes 2, a system of small displays deployed next to office doors in our department. I spent some time developing a component which would allow users to send messages to the display outside their office using SMS.

CASIDE Project
MSc Project Website