Author: Lisa Tweedie

Lisa is a visiting researcher at the University of Bath, Department of Computer Science.

Her current interests include: Slow Technology, Interaction Design, Technology for everyone, Visualization; Applying Design Theory to Interactivity, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia and Home Education.

Lisa is interested in technology that creates a positive "presence" in our lives rather than adds yet another source of stress. She believes that perceptual artifacts e.g. graphical, aural and tactile objects can enhance this sense of presence. She would love the opportunity to study the design theory of such interactive artefacts. She would argue that Technology design today is market led based around the pace of business. However that does not fit in with the pace of the lives of the vast majority of the worlds population: children, the elderly, carers, non-business people, rural populations, developing world populations ... these people tend to travel through their day in a fairly haphazard manner, they take on new things slowly and minimal solutions tend to suffice. Thus she would call for a "slow technology" which is conservative about change and where the design focus is on simple sustainable solutions.

Lisa maintains an active collaboration with her former Supervisor Professor Robert Spence at Imperial College, London. She recently enjoyed many energetic discussion with him over the structure and content of the rewrite of his book "Information Visualization" due out late 2006.

Lisa started out doing a design based course in "Engineering Product Design" at South Bank Polytechnic. This gave her a great initial design training but she soon realised she wanted to follow a career in more human based design and switched to a degree in Human Psychology at Aston University which had a HCI, AI, Cog. Science and Ergonomics components. Her final year project was on the use of maps in Hypertext.

She then went to work as a research assistant to Phil Barnard at the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit. Her research work involved lengthy experimental investigations into visual search of icon arrays. She also created the AnimICS animations that Phil used to illustrate his theory. During her time there she was able to meet and get to know many userati both at the APU and Europarc.

Bob Spence then invited her to do a PhD with him at Imperial College in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. The Thesis "Exploiting Interactivity in Graphical Problem Solving: from visual cues to insight" was defended in 1997. Imperial was an exciting and eclectic international environment. She and Bob and the team around them created several innovative new visualization tools for raw data and statistical models. These included: the attribute explorer (since reimplemented by IBM), the prosection matrix and the influence explorer.

In 1996 She cowrote a sucessful EPSRC proposal for Post-Doctoral research with Professor John Nelder, Professor Robert Spence and Zahid Malik into visualisation tools for statistical modelling.  She was also Local Co-ordinator for the British HCI Conference held at Imperial College.

In 1998 she left academia to broaden her horizons in industry. She worked as an Interaction Designer at Nortel Networks designing visualization tools for network management and also the front end for a telephone fraud software based on genetic algorithms (SuperSleuth). She is a co-author on two patents based on this work.

In 1999 she moved to work for Oracle at Thames Valley Park on their UML Modelling tools. She helped design and test the tools that are now in Oracles Jdeveloper (a Java integrated development environment). It was both satisfying and terrifying to watch a software product come to market! She left Oracle in 2003.

In 2005 she taught an interaction design masters course and a final year Undergraduate Advanced HCI course in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath.

Lisa has an active home life with her partner, three young children, two fish and lots of stick insects.