Ben Kraal

Dr Ben Kraal is a Research Fellow with the People and Systems Lab at QUT. His work is situated at the intersection of design and qualitative sociology and draws on both disciplines to reveal how systems and services are made and made useful.

His PhD looked at the lived experience of people who use speech recognition software every day and at how speech recognition software could be made more useful for daily work.

More recently Dr Kraal’s work has focussed on how people experience complex systems and services with a focus on airports and healthcare. He is a joint recipient of the 2011 Engineers Australia Queensland Branch award for R&D for his work on the pilot project for the ARC-Linkage funded “Airports of the Future” project. Dr Kraal’s work on airport passenger experience has been highly influential and achieved significant impact in the industry. In the healthcare domain Dr Kraal has focussed on the experiences of patients, nurses and doctors and other stakeholders in several projects. Notable examples include identifying expertise in nurses applying compression bandages, performing user-testing for a prototype telehealth stethoscope and investigating eHealth system experiences of people with an intellectual disability.