Hi, I’m John. Welcome to my website. I am currently a Research Associate (Post-Doc) at Newcastle University, where I work in the Digital Interaction group based in Culture Lab. Hopefully you will find lots of useful information about me here – such as my research interests, the projects I am doing now and have worked on in the past, my publications, and my general musings (when I get around to doing them). To find out more about my background, visit here.

As way of a brief introduction though, I am an interaction designer with interests in:

1) understanding the relationships between the ageing body and the ageing mind, and how these might affect the manner in which digital technologies are experienced;

2) questioning why we should involve people in design processes, and what ‘participation’ might mean in cross-, inter- and trans-disciplinary research;

3) exploring new methods and mechanisms for designing for collaboration, participation, and novel experiences;

4) developing new systems, services and policies that can both support ageing and well-being yet simultaneously question the concepts and rhetoric surround it.

Having spent the last 10 years performing research round the broad context of ageing and digital technologies, I believe that too much design focuses on the negatives of ageing and not the abundant positives. Along with much user-/people-centred design, experiences and uses of technologies tend to be engineered by the designer – or, at least the designer implies they can be engineered. I believe that design should instead be about opening up spaces for people to reflect upon their own experiences and form rich and engaging experiences in the future. This might not mean usable products or technologies; it might not mean technologies that enter to the background of quotidian life; it might not mean products and services that actually make life simpler and are immediately understood by ‘users’. In the context of ageing, complexity, effort, time, and the challenge afforded by new technologies are pre-requisites for embodied well-being.

You can find me usually sitting in Space 2, Culture Lab, Newcastle University. If you’re not fortunate enough to be in Newcastle though, I can be contacted at john[.]c[.]vines[@]gmail[.]com. I also have profiles on academia.edu, and linkedin. Oh, and occasionally, I tweet.