My research is concerned with understanding people’s experience of emerging social, personal, and work technologies and their use of those technologies in sustaining relationships. This research is broadly pragmatic and socio-cultural and one of its aims is to inform the design of usable and enriching technologies.

In 2004 I wrote a book with Peter Wright (Technology as Experience, MIT Press) that developed an account of human experience as simultaneously aesthetic, sensual, intellectual, and emotional. This was intended to provide conceptual foundations for experience-centred design in HCI. I am now working on the follow-up project, again with Peter, a methodologically oriented analysis of user research in user-centred design.

This research feeds back into my teaching in the areas of qualitative research, theory and psychology, and people and technology.

I am interested in supervising research projects that relate to the projects and areas outlined above: e.g. qualitative research on people’s experiences with technology in interesting contexts (e.g. as I get older I have an emerging interest in the potential that technology has for older people and in health care settings), particular kinds of person-technology experiences (enchantment, intimacy), aesthetic aspects of interaction with and through information and communication technologies (e.g. social networks and mobile phones), user-centred service design (e.g. hospice care, school), and the design process itself.

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