Sara is a researcher, designer and educator, her work spanning interaction design, interior design and physical computing. She is currently a PhD student and an HCI researcher at Open Lab, Newcastle University, where her work centers around Ubiquitous Environments from the lens of Architecture and Interior Design.
Driven by a vision where the future interior designs would no longer have to be static, Sara is investigating ways we could potentially design and build interiors that are context-aware, dynamic, changeable and `living'; responding to our implicit and intuitive interactions to meet our needs, support our well-being and improve the quality of living.
Sara's current research is about novel interfaces that are soft, flexible and dynamic, with a particular focus on building OUIs (Organic User Interfaces). She is interested in how we can embed interior spaces with interactivity using soft electronics, e-textiles and smart materials that are malleable, shape-changing or colour-changing. And studying how will people perceive, interact and live with interactive interior spaces.
Experience
2015–present
Interactive-Interior Design Researcher, Newcastle University
2014–2015
Human-Computer Interaction Lecturer, MSA University
Decorating Public and Private Spaces: Identity and Pride in a Refugee Camp, Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2018
ActuEating: Designing, Studying and Exploring Actuating Decorative Artefacts, Proceedings of the 2018 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2018
2017
Designing Future Ubiquitous Homes with OUI Interiors: Possibilities and Challenges, Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal
2017
Interioractive: Smart Materials in the Hands of Designers and Architects for Designing Interactive Interiors, Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems
2017
Interactive Architecture: Exploring and Unwrapping the Potentials of Organic User Interfaces, Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction