Professor Gilbert Cockton

Gilbert has been active in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design research since 1983. With an international research reputation and almost 190 invited presentations in 19 countries, including 8 keynote addresses.  He has a broad multidisciplinary background, with an MA/PGCE in History and Human Sciences (Education) and a PhD in Computer Science. His research spans from the theoretical foundations of design and evaluation approaches, to applied work with industry on usability, user experience, accessibility and applications of value-focused design and evaluation approaches. From 1997 to 2009, he was Research Chair in HCI at the University of Sunderland, where he secured funding for research and knowledge transfer projects and research infrastructure with a value exceeding £6M. This included a NESTA Fellowship from 2005-2008 on value-centred design. He has served in many roles within the international HCI community, including Vice-Chair of IFIP TC13 (2004 06), Chair of British HCI Group (2001-2004), Chair of ACM CHI 2003 and BCS HCI 2000 Conferences, and Secretary of IFIP WG2.7 on user interface engineering (1993-99). He is Editor Emeritus of the journal Interacting with Computers, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Usability Studies.

Gilbert has published extensively since 1985 on usability, user experience and accessibility, grounded- and worth/value-centred design, and notations and architectures for interactive software. His key focus is on the balance between human-focused practice and creative and technical inventiveness in interaction design and evaluation. His research aims to develop design and evaluation approaches that expose the tacit knowledge underlying the many connections within the design process, e.g., between designs and their beneficiaries, design purpose and evaluation, and more complex connections between multiple aspects of designs and their interconnections.

Prizes, Grants and Awards

• Visiting Professor, Child-Computer Interaction Group, University of Central Lancashire
• International Advisory Board of HCD-Net, Japan (national HCI project)
• Editor Emeritus, Interacting with Computers
• Distinguished Research Board of Advisors, American Biographical Institute
• NESTA fellowship (October 2005 – January 2008)
• John Long Award for Best Paper, HCI 2003
• Silver Core (Service Award), International Federation of Information Processing.
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

European Science Foundation	~£8,000	11.09-10.13	COST IC0904 Scientific Co-ordinator Group leader, travel support for self and Interaction Design colleagues at Northumbria
Microsoft	£18,750	09.07-12.07	Visiting Researcher
NESTA	£75,000	10.05-12.07	NESTA Fellowship, Value-Centred Design
ONE (CODEWORKS)	£20,000	06.05-9.05	ATL Proof of Concept User Testing
ONE (CODEWORKS)	£16,000	03.05-8.05	Digital Gerontechnology: Opportunities, Approaches and State of the Art (DiGOAS)
European Science Foundation	~£8,000	02.05-18.08	COST 294 Working Group leader, travel support for self and HCI colleagues at Sunderland University, plus 4,000 euros support for Working Group
HEFCE	£144,000	08.04-6.06	Digital CoKE, plus institutional HEIF-2 extension
NCR, EPSRC	£44,155	09.03-8.06	PhD Studentship, NCR £28,000 match for EPSRC DTA funding.
ERDF	£1,472,868	01.03-12.05	North East IT Reach Out (NITRO), £3.6m collaboration between Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside Universities (with additional £280K private sector contributions)

Exhibitions, collections and events

Design Lead, Glasgow International Design Festival, Case study: EPRC Ltd, Glasgow Fly on the Wall exhibition, one month international design festival.

Patents granted and applications

An apparatus and method for providing information to a visually and /or hearing impaired operator, UK Patent PCT/GB2008/001361 Publication date: 30.10.08 (International Patent Pending WO/2008/129259 International Filing Date 17.04.08)

Products and artefacts in production/print, electronic/digital media, commissions.

VIDEO PROGRAM (co-editor) CHI 2003 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, DVD, ACM: New York, ISBN Number: 1-58113-669-2, 2003

If we can't bottle design expertise, can we provide better ingredients?

Almost 50 years ago, proponents of design methods thought that we could bottle up design expertise in reliably repeatable methods. Just as science was supposedly based on reliable, repeatable methods, so it was felt that design procedures could be written down, learnt and practised.

Within two decades, most proponents of design methods had abandoned their attempts to commoditise ‘good design’. However, in emerging design areas such as Interaction Design, engineering value systems have kept design and evaluation methods alive. For two decades, research on Human-Computer Interaction sought to develop, validate or compare methods from Interaction Design. This endeavour has largely failed in its aims, but the realisation of failure has identified new opportunities for research: we can't provide recipes for design, but we can definitely provide better ingredients. My current research focuses on the nature of these ingredients, i.e., resources for design and evaluation that can be shown to have positive impacts in appropriate work contexts.

My research spans from the theoretical foundations of design and evaluation approaches, to applied work with industry on usability, user experience, accessibility and applications of value-focused design and evaluation approaches.

Focusing mainly on the balance between human-focused practice and creative and technical inventiveness in interaction design and evaluation, my aim is to develop design and evaluation approaches that expose the tacit knowledge underlying the many connections with the design process and to create new resources for design and evaluation that embed this tacit knowledge, allowing more designers to systematically exploit best practices in design innovation.

Designing as Sketching to Connect
Cockton, G., “Designing Worth: Connecting Preferred Means with Probable Ends, Interactions, 15(4), July + August issue, 54-57

Approaches to Assessing Existing, Emerging and future UIMs and their effective uses
Cockton, G., Woolrych, A. and Lavery, D., “Chapter 59: Inspection-based methods”. The Human-Computer Interaction handbook, eds. A. Sears and J. Jacko, 2nd edition, 1171-1190, CRC Press, USA, 20007, 978-1420088878

Full list available at Northumbria Research Link (NRL)

Professor Gilbert Cockton - Published Work (PDF)

I teach at all levels throughout the School. At undergraduate level I contribute to Interaction Design teaching on our Interactive Media Design and Design for Industry courses.

I lecture on the theory and practice of human-focused design practice innovation on our MA Design and Multidisciplinary Design Innovation courses.

I also supervise PhD students on design research that focuses on the demonstrable achievement of worthwhile outcomes from Interaction Design and related areas (e.g., e-learning and educational systems)

- Scientific Co-ordinator, COST IC0904 Action on Transectoral Integration of software design and evaluation approaches (network of researchers in 25 European countries)

- University of Tampere (Finland, TEKES SUXES project, Cultural Differences in Interaction Design and Evaluation)

- Microsoft Research (Connecting Design Practices to Human Values)

- Universidade do Minho (Portugal) Development of Worth Maps and other Worth-centred Approaches

- Indiana University and IUPUI (USA) Critical Theory and Design, Designing for Brand