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Staff Profile

Professor Abi Durrant

Professor of Interaction Design

Background

I’m Professor of Interaction Design and Co-Director of Open Lab and EPSRC Centre for Digital Citizens at Newcastle University, predominantly working in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

My research addresses the significant design challenges that we face for managing wellbeing in our everyday interactions with digital technologies and personal data. I have explored digital interactions in the context of health and care management, family relationships and legacies, major life transitions, memorialisation, cultural heritage, human rights media, and the representation of identity.

I am Principal Investigator and Co-Director of EPSRC Northern Health Futures (NortHFutures) Hub, a digital health hub for the North East and North Cumbria region funded to facilitate cross-sector research and innovation grounded in community-based design.

I’m also Co-I on EPSRC AGENCY: Assuring Citizen Agency in a World with Complex Online Harms (EP/W032481/1), which addressing design challenges for supporting people to live safe and well, using participatory design research methods. I also sit on the department's EDI committee and on the executive board for the Newcastle Centre of Research Excellence in Children and Youth.

I am also Co-Director of Open Lab's Doctoral Training Centre in Digital Civics.

I was previously Principal Investigator for the EPSRC-funded project INTUIT: Interaction Design for Trusted Sharing of Personal Health Data to Live Well with HIV (EP/R033900/1), a design-led programme that aims to understand and address issues of trust, identity and privacy that are experienced by people living with HIV when sharing self-generated data with clinicians, peers, and others, for the purposes of self-managing their condition.

Other completed research projects include EPSRC Playing Out with IOT (EP/P025544/2), exploring an outdoor design space for children’s creative free play with Internet of Things.

My work is grounded in co-creative, experience-centred, and research-through-design approaches, working closely with non-academic partners to define and conduct research.

I actively contribute to a number of academic communities, including SIGCHI Conferences and the Design Research Society (DRS) Conference. I am a Steering Committee member for the biennial RTD Conference series. I am also a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and Reviewer for EPSRC.

The most up-to-date list of my publications can be found on my Google Scholar page. 

Research

I am currently Principal Investigator of EPSRC INTUIT (EP/R033900/1): https://intuitproject.org/

I am Co-Investigator on EPSRC AGENCY (EP/W032481/1)

I am Co-Investigator on EPSRC Centre for Digital Citizens (EP/T022582/1): https://www.digitalcitizens.uk/

I was recently Co-Investigator of EPSRC Playing Out with IOT (EP/P025544/2), now completed.

More information about previous research projects can be found at: www.abigaildurrant.com.

Teaching

I currently teach Interaction Design on the MSc in Human Computer Interaction Design at Newcastle University.

I currently supervise 10 PhD students, in Interaction Design, Communication Design, Industrial Design, Computer Science, Fine Art, and Human Computer Interaction. I have previously supervised six PhD students to successful completion and routinely take up external examining roles at universities in the UK and internationally.



Publications