معرفی
Abigail C. Durrant is Professor of Interaction Design and Co-Director of Open Lab at Newcastle University's School of Computing. She serves as Co-Director for the EPSRC-funded Centre for Digital Citizens (CDC) and NortHFutures Digital Health Hub, and leads the Digital Health Theme for the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research. Durrant also sits on the Directorate for Newcastle University Centre of Research Excellence for Children and Youth, demonstrating her cross-institutional leadership in digital research initiatives.
Her research program addresses critical design challenges in managing health and wellbeing through digital technologies, AI, and data systems. Durrant has extensively explored the digital representation of Self across multiple contexts including health and care, family relationships, children's play and creativity, major life transitions, memorialization, cultural visiting, media consumption, and personal identity management. Her work is grounded in participatory, co-creative and research-through-design approaches that prioritize collaboration with key stakeholders to define and conduct research that addresses real-world problems, particularly focusing on vulnerable populations and health equity issues.
Durrant's recent publications reveal a strong trajectory in designing for trusted sharing of personal health data, with particular emphasis on HIV care contexts as evidenced by her 2024 AIDS Care publication. Her research consistently bridges Human-Computer Interaction with healthcare applications, focusing on privacy, security, and ethical considerations in digital health technologies. The temporal dimension of design research emerges as a consistent theme across her work, examining how design artifacts function over time and how they support or disrupt user experiences in long-term contexts.
- Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Professor Durrant actively supervises undergraduate, postgraduate taught, and postgraduate research students while teaching Interaction Design on the MSc course in HCI through Open Lab. She has led significant research projects including NortHFutures (a cross-sector consortium for responsibly designed health-tech), EPSRC INTUIT (focused on trusted sharing of personal health data for HIV care), EPSRC Playing Out with IoT (children's free play with Internet of Things), and EPSRC Digital Personhood. Her service contributions include membership on the Steering Committee for the Research Through Design Conference series and active engagement in academic service roles within HCI and Design Research fields.
Durrant co-leads Open Lab, a research center specializing in Human-Computer Interaction that works closely with communities, industry, and public sector organizations to develop innovative digital solutions. Her NortHFutures initiative brings together 8 universities, health and care providers, and community organizations to address digital exclusion in the North East and North Cumbria region. She is also actively involved with the EPSRC Centre for Digital Citizens, focusing on how digital technologies impact citizenship and civic engagement.
