Public lecture by professor David Kirk, Professor of Digital Living, Northumbria University

 

Prof David Kirk, Professor of Digital Living

The Human-Centred Smart City

Lecture Theatre 003, Business and Law Building, City Campus East, Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 

Refreshments will be available from 6.00pm

Synopsys

David`s research focuses on the design of interactive digital technologies, from a pointedly human-centred perspective. Throughout his career he has concentrated on trying to understand people, their desires, values, and lived experiences. This is used to better design evocative (and sometimes provocative) technologies for living. 

In this lecture, David will explore some of the projects he has worked on, from the design of technologies in the home to support families with remote working parents, to reactive architectures which respond to their inhabitants’ physiology, through to virtual memorials embedded in the Slovenian woods. Through these diverse projects he will point to a future of the ‘smart-city’ emerging bottom-up, from the interactions between different digital technologies and services - and make the case for humanising the smart city - arguing for the need to better understand a city’s inhabitants when designing for digital futures. 

About the Speaker

Professor David Kirk studies Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the design of interactive computational technologies in the School of Computer and Information Science. He holds particular interest in design research methods and the ways in which technology design can be centred on rich understanding of user experiences, cultures and contexts.

David has 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. His background is in Psychology (BSc) and Ergonomics (MSc) with a PhD in Computer Science. Over the years his work has been heavily influenced by the sociologists, philosophers and designers that he has collaborated with and consequently he takes 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, his research is increasingly based on qualitative methods and design-research practices.