Marta Cecchinato

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As of February 2018, I have started as Lecturer at Northumbria University. You can contact me at m.cecchinato@northumbria.ac.uk or visit Northumbria University profile.

Research Interests

My PhD research focuses on the role that communication technologies have across multiple devices and how this affects our work-home boundaries. I initially focused a lot on email management, as it is one of the most common communication channel out there, but moved on to cover any computer-mediated communication used by participants. Notifications that interrupt us throughout the day and night can happen on any channel, as well as on any device. That is why in my work I make a point of considering not just a single device, but the multi-device ecology that users interact with in their everyday life. By taking a pragmatic and situated approach, I am trying to uncover how people use communication technologies (i.e. channels and devices) to shape boundaries between work and personal life, and how they work around technology constraints to make this happen.

You can read more about my project here: Digital Boundaries

Brief biography

I have a BSc and MSc in Psychology from the University of Padova in Italy, my home country. During my MSc, I spent a year in Finland and worked as a visiting assistant researcher at the Ubiquitous Interaction group, Computer Science Dept. at the University of Helsinki and at HIIT (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology) with Giulio Jacucci. While there, I worked, among other projects, on haptic feedback perception with Eve Hoggan. For my MSc thesis, I worked at HTLab (Human Technology Lab) with Luciano Gamberini on user experience evaluation in multimodal interfaces, which was part of the FP7 EU funded CEEDs project. 

In summer 2015 I completed an internship at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, working with Abigail Sellen in the Human Experience and Design group. Whilst there, I investigated email re-finding behaviours across accounts and devices, working closely also with Milad Shokouhi from the Machine Intelligence and Perception group.