Welcome Adjunct Professor Chris Speed

Professor Chris Speed FRSE, is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh where he collaborates with a wide variety of partners to explore how design provides methods to adapt, and create products and services within a networked society. He is especially favours transgressive design interventions, to help identify and promote the values we care about most, including coffee machines that order their own ethical supplies, hairdryers that ask you to wait for the right time to blow dry your hair, and apps for sham marriages. Chris co-directs the Institute for Design Informatics that is home to a combination of researchers working across the fields of interaction design, temporal design, anthropology, software engineering and digital architecture, as well as the PhD, MA/MFA and MSc and Advanced MSc programmes. Chris has an established track record in directing large complex grants with industry partners, being involved in 30 research grants (leading on 11) since 2009 across the UK research councils (ESPRC, ESRC and AHRC) totalling in excess of £21m. Chris is Director of the £7.4m (£5.5m AHRC, £0.5m and DDI £1.4m) Creative Informatics R&D Partnership, one of the nine AHRC funded Creative Industries Clusters.