Rose Johnson

Please note: I am part-time so am not on site everyday. I am usually at UCL on Wednesdays and Thursdays 7am - 4pm.

I am interested in how people and technology interact in the everyday world. In particular how technology can be applied to new and unexplored domains, such as music learning, political engagement or bringing communities together. My preferred methodological approach is to discover through the process of design, by prototyping systems and then seeing how they are used in the real-world through in-the-wild user studies.

I am a part-time post-doc at UCL. I am working on a project called CodeMe with Venus Shum and Nic Marquardt. This is a toolkit for teaching people of all ages about programming and electronics. We want to find out how best to design the toolkit and accompanying tutorials to promote engagement and inspire people to use the toolkit creatively.

I am also working on a project called Physikit with Connie Golsteijn, Sarah Gallacher, Steven Houben and Saskia Bakker. This is a toolkit to explore how data can be represented physically. We plan to build several modules that grow and move in different ways depending on the data that is sent to them. We will then use them in workshops with the public to enable them to experience data in a different way. This research is part of the Intel Collaborative Research Institute.

Brief biography

I passed my PhD in October 2014. My PhD explores how to use real-time feedback to help violinists learn key aspects of technique such as posture and bowing. To investigate this I designed and built a series of prototypes which sense the movement/posture of players using inertial motion sensors and give feedback either using vibrators positioned on the body or through a visual display. Each of these prototypes was tested in a different setting eventually concluding with a study with members of a high school orchestra who used the prototypes both at in school practices and at home. In every evaluation I aim to study the prototypes in real-world settings with participants who are violin players working on relevant tasks so that people are using the feedback under realistic levels of cognitive and perceptual load and have genuine motivation to learn and improve. From the findings of these user studies I am building a framework for designing real-time multimodal feedback.

I have a masters in theoretical physics from Swansea University in which I won the P.M. Davidson prize for best theoretical project. I then moved to the Open University in 2009 to study for my PhD with Janet van der Linden and Yvonne Rogers. I transferred to UCL after two years.

In 2010 I was an intern at Microsoft Research Cambridge for three months under Kenton O'Hara and Abigail Sellen. Together we carried out an ethnographic study of interventional radiology to understand the potential for touchless interaction in this kind of medical setting. We published our findings at CHI 2012.