Yvonne Rogers is director of the Interaction Centre at UCL (UCLIC) and a professor of Interaction Design. She is Principal Investigator for the Intel-funded Cities collaborative research Institute (cities.io) at UCL. Her research is in the areas of ubiquitous computing, interaction design and HCI. This involves informing, building and evaluating novel user experiences through creating and assembling a diversity of future technologies (e.g. tangibles, physical computing, internet of things) that augment everyday, learning, community engagement and collaborative work activities.
She has been instrumental in promulgating new theories (e.g., external cognition), alternative methodologies (e.g., in-the-wild studies) and far-reaching research agendas (e.g., “Being Human: HCI in 2020” manifesto). She is a co-author of the definitive textbook on Interaction Design and HCI (now published in its 4th edition) that has been translated into 6 languages. She has published over 250 articles, including a recent monograph “HCI Theory: Classical, Modern and Contemporary”. She is a fellow of the BCS and the ACM CHI Academy. She was also awarded a prestigious EPSRC dream fellowship concerned with rethinking the relationship between ageing, computing and creativity.
“Much has been written about the potential benefits of being interdisciplinary. By bringing together distinctive components of two or more disciplines, traditional boundaries can be crossed, resulting in new insights and technological advances – that would not have emerged from working in one discipline alone. Talking with others who have been trained to frame, think about and solve problems differently can lead to new ideas, insights and disagreements. It is this combination of spark, aha and friction that encourages risk taking and daring to be different.
In my research, I have always worked with others – developmental psychologists, engineers, philosophers, artists, computer scientists, choreographers, architects and professional designers. We design, build and evaluate a diversity of innovative technologies, in-the-wild, with the aim of augmenting and extending people in their work, learning and everyday lives. Sometimes, we stubbornly refuse to see each other’s point of view, but mostly we end up combining our ideas, skills and know-how to promote new visions of what is possible and ways of achieving them. Such an unruly way of working often means losing the security blanket of conventional paradigms and ‘tried and tested’ methods. Instead, we err towards working in terms of a mix of serendipity and invention where creative experimentation is what drives research. To demonstrate how such a lack of discipline can be productive, knowledge advancing and even groundbreaking, I will illustrate my talk with interdisciplinary projects that we are proud of; many of which exhibit new forms of ‘ludic engineering’ that have promoted learning through novel, playful visions of technology. These include designing novel learning experiences, rethinking ageing in terms of creativity, and encouraging people to change their behaviour through technological nudging.”
Yvonne Rogers / UCL Interaction Centre, London
Do We Need Discipline?
Monday, June 27th 2016 / 19:00
Oberlichtsaal im Hauptgebäude
Geschwister-Scholl-Str. 8
99423 Weimar
This talk is part of the Bauhausinteraction Colloquium.