Russell Beale

Russell Beale is a specialist in human-computer interaction and in user-focused approaches to design. He has worked for many years on integrating artificial intelligence techniques into interactive systems, including the onCue intelligent agent system, and he led the development of a creative design system for complex engineering systems. His recent work has been in the field of design for pervasive computing, including creating reactive ambient artwork, and the use of implicit and explicit context for the EU mobile learning project Mobilearn.

My web page contains information about myself and my research interests, and my blog contains posting on design, usability, HCI, and society that may be of interest to some members of the network.

Nature-inspired creative design
Some topics that fit under that are:
Cognitive modelling of the creative design process, and applications
Understanding how people are creative, and the cognitive processes that exist to allow this.

We can extend this to look at the physical process too, and map that process onto the creation of other things especially software artefacts.

Exploring the creative space
Developing on from work done in using evo comp to explore the design space, can we create systems that help us explore the creative space as well?

Intelligent interfaces
Concepts that don't fit that approach but that I'm interested in tend to fall under the banner of intelligent, artistic interfaces:

Creativity, artistic merit, and visualisation
Look at how artists understand and represent the world, especially complex information, especially abstractly, and use that for the ambient art and high-dimensional visualisation work.

Design icons versus usable systems
Compare a Ferrari to a Fiesta - one is designed by an individual, is idiosyncratic and an icon - the other is highly usable, designed by committee. HCI and usability have drifted towards user-centered design and evaluation using group of people - how can we recapture creative flair and still create usable systems. Is usability and great desing the same thing, completely different, or does it depend?

Intelligent interactive systems
Building on our repotation or intelligent, usable systems design, can we be creative with new interfaces that are really clever (ideally, magic) and create great user experiences

Creativity in new media
Turning the above approaches around (which were all using IT to help or analyse creativity) can we be creative with new media (bluetooth, blogs, twiki's, mobile internet, etc. etc.) Example: the use of a camera phone not as a camera and a phone, but as a portable scanner (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,63493,00.html)

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