Research + Practice

Capability and Vision Impairment

Study­ing the mutu­al sens­ing and com­bined achieve­ments of peo­ple with dif­fer­ent lev­els of vision, work­ing togeth­er. As well as deep­en­ing our under­stand­ing of capa­bil­i­ty — as it is col­lec­tive­ly accom­plished — this research is direct­ed at inform­ing a role for machine learn­ing in assis­tive tech­nol­o­gy and build­ing assis­tive sys­tems that sup­port rich­er forms of social inter­ac­tion. This work is in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Cindy Ben­nett, Rebec­ca Fiebrink, Kat­ja Hof­mann, Nate Kush­man, Ewa Luger, Ceci­ly Mor­ri­son, Sebas­t­ian Nowozin, Anja Thieme, and Shi­mon White­son.

Project



Publications


Ceci­ly Mor­ri­son, Edward Cutrell, Anu­pa­ma Dharesh­war, Kevin Doher­ty, Anja Thieme, Alex Tay­lor (2017) Imag­in­ing Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Appli­ca­tions with Peo­ple with Visu­al Dis­abil­i­ties Using Tac­tile Ideation, Pro­ceed­ings of the 19th Inter­na­tion­al ACM SIGACCESS Con­fer­ence on Com­put­ers and Acces­si­bil­i­ty, p. 81–90, New York, NY: ACM, pdf, doi:10.1145/3132525.3132530

Alex S. Tay­lor (2017) Becom­ing More Capa­ble, Platy­pus, The CASTAC Blog, url

Anja Thieme, Cyn­thia L Ben­nett, Ceci­ly Mor­ri­son, Edward Cutrell, Alex S Tay­lor (2018) “I can do every­thing but see!” – How Peo­ple with Vision Impair­ments Nego­ti­ate their Abil­i­ties in Social Con­texts, CHI ’18, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/3173574.3173777

Cyn­thia L Ben­nett, Daniela K Ros­ner, Alex S Tay­lor (2020) The Care Work of Access, CHI ’20, p. 1–15, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/3313831.3376568

Beat­rice Vin­cen­zi, Alex S Tay­lor, Simone Stumpf (2021) Inter­de­pen­dence in Action: Peo­ple with Visu­al Impair­ments and Their Guides Co-Con­sti­tut­ing Com­mon Spaces, Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Inter­act. 5(CSCW1), New York, NY, USA: Asso­ci­a­tion for Com­put­ing Machin­ery, pdf, doi:10.1145/3449143

Ceci­ly Mor­ri­son, Edward Cutrell, Mar­tin Grayson, Anja Thieme, Alex Tay­lor, Geert Roumen, Camil­la Long­den, Sebas­t­ian Tschi­atschek, Rita Faia Mar­ques, Abi­gail Sell­en (2021) Social Sense­mak­ing with AI: Design­ing an Open-End­ed AI Expe­ri­ence with a Blind Child, Pro­ceed­ings of the 2021 CHI Con­fer­ence on Human Fac­tors in Com­put­ing Sys­tems, New York, NY, USA: Asso­ci­a­tion for Com­put­ing Machin­ery, pdf, doi:10.1145/3411764.3445290


Data, Participation and Digital Civics

A col­lec­tion of col­lab­o­ra­tive projects exam­in­ing the rela­tion­ships between data, civic life and place mak­ing. Bring­ing these projects togeth­er is a broad focus on the pro­lif­er­a­tion of data and ana­lyt­ics, and how this might enable dif­fer­ent and pos­si­bly wider forms of par­tic­i­pa­tion. Research has com­bined extend­ed par­tic­i­pa­to­ry research and design meth­ods with large-scale, deploy­ments in the ‘wild’. Results have been pre­sent­ed at the 4S annu­al meet­ing and the CHI con­fer­ence, are in press for the Jour­nal of Com­put­er Sup­port­ed Col­lab­o­ra­tive Work and Demon­stra­tions, and led to pol­i­cy engage­ments (see data-policy.info).
Street party and data fair on TenisonRd
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Projects

Publications


Alex S Tay­lor, Siân Lind­ley, Tim Regan, David Sweeney (2014) Data and life on the street, Big Data & Soci­ety 1(2), pdf

Alex S. Tay­lor (2015) After Inter­ac­tion, Inter­ac­tions 22(5), p. 48–53, pdf, doi:10.1145/2809888

David Sweeney, Tim Regan, Alex Tay­lor, Siân Lind­ley (2015) A Pix­el is Not a Pix­el: Sim­ple Data Chart­ing Made Phys­i­cal, Research Through Design (RTD ’15), pdf, doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.1327998

Tim Regan, David Sweeney, John Helmes, Vasil­lis Vla­chokyr­i­akos, Siân Lind­ley, Alex S. Tay­lor (2015) Design­ing Engag­ing Data in Com­mu­ni­ties, CHI EA ’15, p. 271–274, New York, NY, USA: ACM, pdf, doi:10.1145/2702613.2725432

Alex S. Tay­lor, Siân Lind­ley, Tim Regan, David Sweeney, Vasilis Vla­chokyr­i­akos, Lil­lie Grainger, Jes­sa Lin­gel (2015) Data in place: Think­ing through the Rela­tions Between Data and Com­mu­ni­ty, CHI ’15, p. 2863–2872, New York, NY, USA: ACM, pdf, doi:10.1145/2702123.2702558

Clara Criv­el­laro, Alex S. Tay­lor, Vasil­lis Vla­chokyr­i­akos, Rob Comber, Bet­ti­na Nis­sen, Peter Wright (2016) Re-Mak­ing Places: HCI, ‘Com­mu­ni­ty Build­ing’ and Change, CHI ’16, p. 2958–2969, New York: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/2858036.2858332

Alex S. Tay­lor (2016) Data, (bio)sensing and (other-)worldly sto­ries from the cycle routes of Lon­don, Quan­ti­fied, p. 189–209, Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, pdf, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262034173.003.0011

Siân E. Lind­ley, Anja Thieme, Alex S. Tay­lor, Vasilis Vla­chokyr­i­akos, Tim Regan, David Sweeney (2017) Sur­fac­ing Small Worlds through Data-In-Place, Com­put­er Sup­port­ed Coop­er­a­tive Work (CSCW) 26(1), p. 135–163, pdf, doi:10.1007/s10606-017‑9263‑3

Sara Heitlinger, Lara Hous­ton, Alex Tay­lor, Ruth Cat­low (2021) Algo­rith­mic Food Jus­tice: Co-Design­ing More-than-Human Blockchain Futures for the Food Com­mons, Pro­ceed­ings of the 2021 CHI Con­fer­ence on Human Fac­tors in Com­put­ing Sys­tems, New York, NY, USA: Asso­ci­a­tion for Com­put­ing Machin­ery, pdf, doi:10.1145/3411764.3445655


Computation and Biology

Stud­ies of the bur­geon­ing research in com­pu­ta­tion­al and syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy, and build­ing tools to sup­port this new hybrid of applied sci­ence. This has been com­pli­ment­ed with research into a grass­roots DIY­Bio, as a counter point to main­stream knowl­edge mak­ing prac­tices and pro­duc­tion process­es. Results have been pre­sent­ed wide­ly at the CHI con­fer­ence and CAV, pub­lished in Com­pu­ta­tion­al Cul­ture and Nature (online), and led to a pub­licly avail­able mod­el­ling tool used by biol­o­gists (see BMA).

Project



Publications


Stacey Kuznetsov, Alex S Tay­lor, Eric Pau­los, Carl DiS­al­vo, Tad Hirsch (2012) (DIY)biology and oppor­tu­ni­ties for HCI, DIS ’12, p. 809–810, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf

David Benque, Sam Bour­ton, Caitlin Cock­er­ton, Byron Cook, Jas­min Fish­er, Samin Ish­ti­aq, Nir Piter­man, Alex Tay­lor, Moshe Y Var­di (2012) BMA: visu­al tool for mod­el­ing and ana­lyz­ing bio­log­i­cal net­works, CAV’12, p. 686–692, Berlin, Hei­del­berg: Springer-Ver­lag, pdf, doi:10.1007/978–3‑642–31424-7_50

Alex S Tay­lor, Nir Piter­man, Samin Ish­ti­aq, Jas­min Fish­er, Byron Cook, Caitlin Cock­er­ton, Sam Bour­ton, David Benque (2013) At the inter­face of biol­o­gy and com­pu­ta­tion, CHI ’13, p. 493–502, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/2470654.2470725

Alex S Tay­lor, Jas­min Fish­er, Byron Cook, Samin Ish­ti­aq, Nir Piter­man (2014) Mod­el­ling Biol­o­gy – work­ing through (in-)stabilities and fric­tions, Com­pu­ta­tion­al Cul­ture 1(3), url

Ryan Chuang, Ben­jamin A. Hall, David Benque, Byron Cook, Samin Ish­ti­aq, Nir Piter­man, Alex S. Tay­lor, Moshe Var­di, Stef­fen Koschmieder, Berthold Gottgens, Jas­min Fish­er (2015) Drug Tar­get Opti­miza­tion in Chron­ic Myeloid Leukemia Using Inno­v­a­tive Com­pu­ta­tion­al Plat­form, Sci­en­tif­ic Reports 5, Macmil­lan Pub­lish­ers Lim­it­ed, url


Intelligence and Autonomy

Inves­ti­ga­tions into intel­li­gence and auton­o­my. This work has com­bined field stud­ies and design inter­ven­tions to ques­tion the lim­its placed on machine intel­li­gence and auton­o­my. Through design it aims to invite the pos­si­bil­i­ty of human-non­hu­man rela­tions enlarg­ing the capac­i­ties for being, not enti­ties by them­selves defined by pre­sumed lim­its. Work has been exhib­it­ed at SIGGRAPH, MOMA NYC, and the Bei­jing Inter­na­tion­al Design Tri­en­ni­al.
Audiograph from Rudiments projects

Projects





Publications


Anab Jain, Alex S Tay­lor (2008) Domes­tic Gub­bins, Design and the Elas­tic Mind (online exhibits), New York, NY: Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, url

Anab Jain, Alex S Tay­lor (2008) Life and death of ener­gy-autonomous devices, SIGGRAPH ’08: ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 art gallery, p. 70, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/1400385.1400425

Alex S Tay­lor, Anab Jain, Lau­rel Swan (2009) New Com­pan­ions, Close Engage­ments with Arti­fi­cial Com­pan­ions, Yorick Wilks (ed.), p. 107–120, John Ben­jamins Pub­lish­ing Com­pa­ny, url, doi:10.1075/nlp.8.16tay

Alex S Tay­lor (2009) Machine intel­li­gence, CHI ’09, p. 2109–2118, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/1518701.1519022

John Helmes, Ken­ton O’Hara, Nico­las Vil­lar, Alex Tay­lor (2011) Meerkat and tuba: Design alter­na­tives for ran­dom­ness, sur­prise and serendip­i­ty in rem­i­nisc­ing, INTERACT’11, p. 376–391, Berlin, Hei­del­berg: Springer-Ver­lag, pdf, doi:10.1007/978–3‑642–23771-3_28

John Helmes, Alex S Tay­lor, Xiang Cao, Kristi­na Höök, Peter Schmitt, Nico­las Vil­lar (2011) Rudi­ments 1, 2 & 3: design spec­u­la­tions on auton­o­my, TEI ’11, p. 145–152, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/1935701.1935730

Ari Schlesinger, Ken­ton P O’Hara, Alex S Tay­lor (2018) Let’s Talk about Race: Iden­ti­ty, Chat­bots, and AI, CHI ’18, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/3173574.3173889


Home Life

Stud­ies of home and fam­i­ly life, with empha­sis on the rela­tions between social organ­i­sa­tion and the use of mun­dane arte­facts includ­ing lists, pho­tographs, fridge doors, and clut­ter. Long term field­work has been run along­side design and deploy­ment of pro­to­types and spec­u­la­tive tech­nolo­gies, aim­ing to raise fur­ther ques­tions about life at home.

Projects




Publications


Lau­rel Swan, Alex S Tay­lor (2005) Notes on fridge sur­faces, CHI EA ’05, p. 1813–1816, New York, NY: ACM Press, doi:http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1056808.1057029

Abi­gail Sell­en, Richard Harp­er, Rachel Eard­ley, Shahram Iza­di, Tim Regan, Alex S Tay­lor, Ken R Wood (2006) Home­Note: sup­port­ing sit­u­at­ed mes­sag­ing in the home, CSCW ’06, p. 383–392, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/1180875.1180933

Bar­ry Brown, Alex S Tay­lor, Shahram Iza­di, Abi­gail Sell­en, Joseph ‘Jofish’ Kaye, Rachel Eard­ley (2007) Locat­ing fam­i­ly val­ues: A field tri­al of the where­abouts clock, Ubi­Comp ’07, p. 354–371, Berlin, Hei­del­berg: Springer-Ver­lag, pdf, doi:10.1007/978–3‑540–74853-3_21

Susan P Wyche, Alex Tay­lor, Joseph Kaye (2007) Pot­ter­ing: a design-ori­ent­ed inves­ti­ga­tion, CHI EA ’07, p. 1893–1898, New York, NY: ACM Press, url

Anab Jain, Alex S Tay­lor (2008) Domes­tic Gub­bins, Design and the Elas­tic Mind (online exhibits), New York, NY: Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, url

Lau­rel Swan, Alex S Tay­lor, Richard Harp­er (2008) Mak­ing place for clut­ter and oth­er ideas of home, ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Inter­act. 15(2), p. 1–24, pdf, doi:10.1145/1375761.1375764

Alex S Tay­lor, Susan P Wyche, Joseph ‘Jofish’ Kaye (2008) Pot­ter­ing by design, NordiCHI ’08, p. 363–372, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/1463160.1463200

Siân E Lind­ley, Abi­gail Dur­rant, David Kirk, Alex S Tay­lor (2009) Edi­to­r­i­al: Col­lo­cat­ed social prac­tices sur­round­ing pho­tos, Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 67(12), p. 995‑1004, url, doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2009.08.004

Abi­gail Dur­rant, Alex S Tay­lor, David Frohlich, Abi­gail Sell­en, David Uzzell (2009) Pho­to dis­plays and inter­gen­er­a­tional rela­tion­ships in the fam­i­ly home, BCS-HCI ’09, p. 10–19, Swin­don, UK: British Com­put­er Soci­ety, pdf

Siân E Lind­ley, Richard Banks, Richard Harp­er, Anab Jain, Tim Regan, Abi­gail Sell­en, Alex S Tay­lor (2009) Resilience in the face of inno­va­tion: House­hold tri­als with Bub­ble­Board, Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 67(2), p. 154–164, pdf, doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2008.07.008


Material Investigations

Inves­ti­ga­tions into and exper­i­ments with hard­ware as design materials.
Urban scene with woman with RFID tattoo on back and skateboarder with RFID tattoo on arm. Photos of hacked RFID tags from Rethinking RFID.

Projects




Publications


Anab Jain, Alex S Tay­lor (2008) Objects Incog­ni­to: RFID and Body Read­ers, Design and the Elas­tic Mind (online exhibits), New York, NY: Muse­um of Mod­ern Art

Anab Jain, Nico­lai Mar­quardt, Alex S Tay­lor (2008) Near-Future RFID, Arti­facts Ses­sion, EPIC ’08, p. 352–353, Copen­hagen, Den­mark: Amer­i­can Anthro­po­log­i­cal Assoc., pdf

Susanne Seitinger, Daniel M Taub, Alex S Tay­lor (2010) Light bod­ies: explor­ing inter­ac­tions with respon­sive lights, TEI ’10, p. 113–120, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/1709886.1709908

Nico­lai Mar­quardt, Alex S Tay­lor, Nico­las Vil­lar, Saul Green­berg (2010) Rethink­ing RFID: aware­ness and con­trol for inter­ac­tion with RFID sys­tems, CHI ’10, p. 2307–2316, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/1753326.1753674

Nico­lai Mar­quardt, Alex Tay­lor, Saul Green­berg (2010) Vis­i­ble and con­trol­lable RFID tags, CHI EA ’10, p. 3057–3062, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf

Petra Sund­ström, Alex S Tay­lor, Ken­ton O’Hara (2011) Sketch­ing in soft­ware and hard­ware Blue­tooth as a design mate­r­i­al, Mobile­HCI ’11, p. 405–414, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/2037373.2037434

Scott David­off, Nico­las Vil­lar, Alex S Tay­lor, Shahram Iza­di (2011) Mechan­i­cal hijack­ing: how robots can accel­er­ate Ubi­Comp deploy­ments, Ubi­Comp ’11, p. 267–270, New York, NY: ACM Press, pdf, doi:10.1145/2030112.2030148


Project Tokyo is work­ing with peo­ple who are blind and par­tial­ly sight­ed to cre­ate a deeply per­son­al agent. Using AI and com­put­er vision, the agent will allow peo­ple to build up and tune an under­stand­ing of their sur­round­ings by query­ing the social, phys­i­cal and tex­tu­al envi­ron­ment. Under­pin­ning the project is an ambi­tious research agen­da in devel­op­ing state of the art machine learn­ing and inter­ac­tion tech­niques that allow users to more read­i­ly adapt their sys­tem to their needs.
A year-long project inves­ti­gat­ing data and it rela­tions with a street and its com­mu­ni­ty. In col­lab­o­ra­tion with Siân Lind­ley, Tim Regan, David Sweeney, Anja Thieme, Vasilis Vla­chokyr­i­akos, Lil­lie Grainger, Jes­sa Lin­gel, and res­i­dents of Teni­son Road.
Extend­ed engage­ment with stake­hold­ers liv­ing and work­ing on an estate in South East Lon­don. Look­ing to under­stand the mul­ti­ple ways peo­ple ori­en­tate to com­mu­ni­ty and how walk­ing and talk­ing might help with sur­fac­ing the pro­duc­tive dif­fer­ences. Research led by Clara Criv­el­laro of Open Lab, New­cas­tle University.
Bio Mod­el Ana­lyz­er is a new bio­log­i­cal mod­el­ling tool that illus­trates sig­nalling path­ways and deter­mines cel­lu­lar sta­bi­liza­tion. The tool rep­re­sents a merg­ing of per­spec­tives from sys­tems biol­o­gy, for­mal meth­ods, human com­put­er inter­ac­tion and design. See BMA and this page for an overview and video.
Design spec­u­la­tions on machine auton­o­my and every­day life. In col­lab­o­ra­tion with John Helmes, Xiang Cao, Kristi­na Höök, Peter Schmitt, and Nic Villar.
Exper­i­ment­ing with the rela­tions between ener­gy and auton­o­my. For two videos see here and here. A col­lab­o­ra­tion with Anab Jain.
Design spec­u­la­tions on live­ly objects in the home. A col­lab­o­ra­tion with Anab Jain.
Design and deploy­ment of sit­u­at­ed mes­sag­ing device for the home.
Design and deploy­ment of coarse-graned loca­tion­ing ‘clock’ in fam­i­ly homes. Col­lab­o­ra­tion with Bar­ry Brown, Shahram Iza­di, Abi­gail Sell­en and Jofish Kaye.
Phys­i­cal exper­i­ments with RFID. Col­lab­o­ra­tions with Anab Jain and Nic Mar­quardt.
Exper­i­ments with Blue­tooth. Col­lab­o­ra­tion with Petra Sundstrom.