Research
My research examines how design shapes human experience, understanding, and responsibility across physical, digital, and immersive contexts. It is structured around key dimensions of human–design relations, focusing on perception and embodied experience, sense-making in data-driven and intelligent systems, and the role of design in care, meaning, and long-term futures.
Design for Colour–Cognitive Performance Interaction in Immersive Environments
This research direction was first established through my work, defining colour–cognitive performance interaction in immersive virtual environments as a distinct field. It positions colour as a fundamental cognitive variable, demonstrating that colour actively interacts with attention, reasoning, and task performance under conditions of immersion and embodiment, an interaction that had not been systematically examined in immersive virtual environments prior to this work. By treating immersive systems as distinct perceptual–cognitive contexts, this research provides indispensable design knowledge for performance-critical XR applications, including mental health, healthcare, learning, and safety-critical environments, where cognitive performance and well-being are inseparable.
Design for Embodied XR Experience and Perception
This research treats XR not as a technology to be optimised, but as a place to be experienced through the body. It asks what it means to see, move, feel, and orient oneself inside immersive environments, and how design can actively shape these perceptual experiences rather than merely support them. Perception is approached as something lived and enacted, formed through movement, spatial relations, and multisensory engagement rather than passive visual input. XR is used as a design space for working directly with how vision, sound, touch, and bodily action come together to produce presence, meaning, and affect. This perspective becomes critical in contexts where experience itself carries ethical and cultural consequences. In mental health and healthcare, immersive environments must support reflection, emotional regulation, and care rather than overstimulation. In cultural heritage, XR enables embodied forms of interpretation that allow people to encounter history, memory, and cultural practice through participation rather than observation. Across these settings, the research advances an experience-led approach to XR design that prioritises inclusivity, sensitivity, and depth over spectacle.
Design for Human–Data–AI Interaction
As data-driven and AI-enabled systems increasingly mediate everyday decisions, this research direction is concerned with a central design question: how can humans remain active, reflective participants in computational systems rather than passive endpoints of automation? The work examines how data and artificial intelligence are encountered, interpreted, and negotiated through design, with particular attention to agency, transparency, and trust. Rather than treating AI as a purely technical intelligence, this research approaches it as a design material and collaborator, shaped through interaction, representation, and context. Spatial, immersive, and embodied interfaces, including XR and data-rich environments, are used to render abstract data legible and experientially meaningful, supporting sense-making and shared understanding. This perspective is especially critical in emotionally and ethically sensitive contexts, such as health, neurodiversity, and social care, where misinterpretation of data can reinforce exclusion or harm. By foregrounding human values and lived experience, this research contributes design-led approaches for creating adaptive, interpretable, and inclusive human–data–AI systems, ensuring that intelligence is not only computationally powerful, but also socially responsible and culturally situated.