UCL INTERACTION CENTRE

UCLIC Director Professor of Interaction Design Location: Room 8.14 University College London Malet Place Engineering Building (8th Floor) Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK Work landline: +44 (0)20 7679 7843 (x37843) email: y.rogers at ucl.ac.uk blog: interactiveingredients.com Intel Cities Institute

Yvonne Rogers is a Professor of Interaction Design and director of UCLIC at UCL. Her research interests are in the areas of ubiquitous computing, interaction design and human-computer interaction. A central theme is how to design interactive technologies that can enhance life by augmenting and extending everyday, learning and work activities. This involves informing, building and evaluating novel user experiences through creating and assembling a diversity of pervasive technologies. 

Yvonne has been awarded a prestigious EPSRC dream fellowship (until Sept'13) rethinking the relationship between ageing, computing and creativity. She has just run a workshop on Food for Thought:Thought for Food, where much thinking, a short documentary and ideas about dining, design and novel techology can now be found.

She is also a visiting professor at the Open University, Indiana University, and Sussex University, and has spent sabbaticals at Stanford, Apple, Queensland University, University of Cape Town, University of Melbourne and UC San Diego. She is also the PI at UCL for the new Intel Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable Connected Cities which was launched in October 2012 as a joint collaboration with Imperial College.

Central to her work is a critical stance towards how visions, theories and frameworks shape the fields of HCI, cognitive science and Ubicomp. 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 has also published a monograph (2012) called "HCI Theory: Classical, Modern and Contemporary."

Brief biography

From 2006-2011, Yvonne was professor of HCI in the Computing Department at the OU, where she set up the Pervasive Interaction Lab. From 2003-2006, she was a professor in Informatics at Indiana University. Prior to this, she spent 11 years at the former School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at Sussex University.

Yvonne was one of the principal investigators on the UK Equator Project (2000-2007) where she pioneered ubiquitous learning. She has published widely, beginning with her PhD work on graphical interfaces to her recent work on public visualisations and behavioural change. She is one of the authors of the definitive textbook on Interaction Design and HCI now in its 3rd edition, that has sold over 150,000 copies worldwide and has been translated into 6 languages. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and the ACM's CHI Academy: "an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the disciplines and/or industry, and led the research and/or innovation in human-computer interaction."

Currently funded projects

- I am the UCL PI for the Intel Collaborative Institute of Sustainable and Connected Cities. A key theme is how to enhance city living and engagement with new technologies.

- I am also working on my EPSRC dream fellowship  (2011-2012) rethinking ageing, ICT and creativity (see video below).

- I am also the PI for a MARIE CURIE network (2012-2016) called UBIHEALTH - that connects researchers from Europe, USA, China and Latin America.

For more about my research see projects.

Current Projects

Behavioural Change

This project explores how ubiquitous technology interventions can facilitate behavioural change. It investigates how new kinds of salient information can be delivered in innovative ways, using affordable pervasive, ambient and wearable technologies, to help people make better-informed decisions in situ. Examples of behaviours that are being targeted include those that have been identified as problematic (e.g., healthy living, well-being) or resistant to change (e.g., laziness, concentration) but have the potential to be 'nudged' in a desired direction. 

• Persuading people to take the stairs: twinkly lights and ambient displays

• Helping people to make more informed decisions when food shopping: the lambent shopping handle

• Reducing electricity usage at the community level: The Pulse of Tidy Street

Rethinking Ageing, ICT and Creativity (dream fellowship)

I am rethinking ubiquitous computing to be engaging and exciting. Not calming  but provocative and playful. And where people - not computers - are the proactive ones. This stretching of minds requires thinking about designing technologies differently; not always to be acting on our behalf or reducing the need for human effort - but that enables people to be more creative, imaginative and be able to solve increasingly complex problems. It involves thinking about how emergent technologies can profoundly change how we live – not only to monitor, guide or aid us but to empower, galvanize and augment. My starting point is to study ageing and cooking. At first blush, these two domains seem quite disparate but by juxtaposing the challenges of one with the understandings of the other, I am moving back and forth between my vision of proactive and engaged people and a targeted population, in terms of specific skills and activities.

• My dream fellowship

Past Funded Projects

• CHANGE - Exploring the feasibility of using ubiquitous technologies to engender change in people's everyday habits

• OTIH - Out there and in here - Exploring how new technologies can support distributed, synchronous collaborations between students in the field and others based in a stationary location

• ShareIT - a theoretical and empirical investigation of co-located collaboration for shareable interfaces

• PRIMMA - An investigation into privacy issues surrounding location-based services, mobile devices, tracking and monitoring devices.

• MusicJacket  - A multi-modal real-time feedback system for augmenting learning to play musical inatruments

• The Question - An immersive theatre project that explores haptic technology in relation to navigation, perception and knowledge

• E-sense - Investigating the extended mind theory through designing novel technologies

• Lillypad - designing mobile learning technologies for supporting indoors and outdoors collaborative learning

• Ubiquitous Computing Grand Challenge - Shaping an International Grand Challenge Community on Ubiquitous Computing

• Co-space - enhancing collaboration and interaction with digital information and physical artifacts

• Dynamo - promoting access to and sharing of information in public spaces across heterogeneous display devices

• Equator - exploring the relationship between the physical and the digital

• Espace - designing novel interactional workspaces

• In-Touch - developing new forms of connectivity and broadband services for social groups, e.g. networks of friends, family and others

• E-science - exploring how we can help people understand complex dynamic systems, from an Antarctic lake to a polluted city

• COTCOS - theories and methodolgies for analysing cooperative technologies

• PUPPET - a virtual theatre for children to be creative and reflective

• ECOi - multimedia learning environment for teaching ecology

Pdfs of my publications can be found both here or here.

Research Publications

Retrieving data...

I teach the Masters HCI-E course Design Practice with Duncan Brumby.

MSc projects

Information about MSc projects is available from Moodle.

Current Research Associates and Visitors

Dr Jon Bird 

Dr Rowanne Fleck

Dr Vaiva Kalnikaitė (Intel Cities)

Dr Sarah Gallacher (intel Cities)

Dr Christian Jetter  (Intel Cities)

Dr Johannes Schoening (Hasselt University)

Current PhD Students

Lisa Koeman (UCL, 2012-)

Rose Johnson (UCL, 2009-)

Stefan Kreitmayer (Open University, 2010-)

Nadia Pantidi (Open University, 2008-)

Ricky Morris (Open University, 2007-)

Anijo Mathew (Open University, 2007-)

Former Research Associates and Visitors (while at OU)

Former PhD Students (Graduated)

• W. Hazlewood (PhD, Informatics, Indiana University, 2011)

• T. Toscos (PhD, Informatics, Indiana University, 2011)

• P. Marshall (DPhil, Sussex University, 2007) “Learning and tangibles.”

• R. Fleck (DPhil, Sussex University, 2008) “Exploring the Potential of Passive Image Capture to Support Reflection on Experience.”

• H. Brignull (DPhil, Sussex University, 2005) “Understanding and Designing for the Voluntary Adoption of Community Displays.”

• L. Guy (PhD., Brighton University, 2005) “Ethnographic studies of changing organizations.”

• S. Woolf (DPhil, Sussex University, 2005) “Expanded Media: Interactive and Generative Processes in New Media Art.”

• A. Lloyd (DPhil, Sussex University, 2004) “A Metacognitively-Oriented Guide for Novice Web Searchers in Educational Settings.”

• N. Otero (DPhil, Sussex University, 2003) “Learning with Interactivity and external representations.”

• M. Garcia (DPhil, Sussex University, 2003) “A tutoring system using Virtual Reality for teaching inorganic chemistry.”

• A. Light (DPhil, Sussex University, 2001) “The transition to Interactivity: Publishing, broadcasting and multimedia.”

• J. Halloran (DPhil, Sussex University, 2000) “The Activity Space: Analyzing Intentionality in Open Cooperative Work.”

• J. Wilson (PhD, London Institute, p/t, 2000) “Developing Support for Artist Software Designers.”

• E. Beck (DPhil, Sussex University, 1994) “Practices of Collaboration in Writing and Their Support.”

• G. Cooper (PhD, Open University, 1991) “Representing the User: a Sociological study of the Discourse of Human-Computer Interaction.”

US Ph.D completed - thesis committees

• S.Harris (Philosophy, Indiana University, 2012)

• W. Ryan (Informatics, Indiana University, 2011)

• E. Callahan (Library and Information Science, Indiana University, 2007)

• K. Siek (Computer Science, Indiana University, 2006)

• A Khali (Computer Science, Indiana University, 2006)