Device Prototyping Summer School at Lancaster University

CXL PhD students Seher Singh and Anh Pham attended the 2025 Device Prototyping Summer School, held at Lancaster University from 15-18 June and sponsored by the pro² network+.

The event itself was a great mix of presentations, demos, tutorials, panels, and hands-on activities, such as soldering components on a printed circuit board and getting to grips with CAD software. The students were able to connect with other brilliant minds across this space, including established researchers such as Steve Hodges and Lorraine Underwood, as well as students from universities across the world. The summer school was very useful in helping the students understand how devices are made and how to scale up their production, and both of them really enjoyed and appreciated this opportunity. 

Seher Singh was also awarded with a prize worth £200 for her prototype idea Tomadoro: a gamified pomodoro device.

You can find more information about the summer school as well as the student papers here: https://prosquared.org/2025-summer-school/

Masterclass with Elizabeth Churchill, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

We have the privilege of hosting a session with Professor Elizabeth Churchill, one of the top scientists in the world in human-centred digital technology, with experience from some of the largest companies in the world. She is currently Department Chair of Human Computer Interaction at MBZUAI, the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, in Abu Dhabi, UAE. 

Time: Wednesday July 23, 14.00-16.00

Place: Waverley 129 (City Campus) – please ask at reception for access

Details:

Dr Elizabeth F. Churchill is Professor and founding Department Chair of Human Computer Interaction at MBZUAI (the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence) in Abu Dhabi, UAE. She was formerly a Senior Director of User Experience at Google. She is an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow, a member of the ACM’s CHI Academy, and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. She has built research teams at Google, eBay, Yahoo, PARC and FujiXerox.

Professor Churchill is an applied social scientist, interactive technology designer and social communications researcher. She has a background in psychology (neuro, experimental, cognitive and social), AI, and cognitive science. For the past 20+ years, she has drawn on social, computer, engineering and data sciences to create innovative end-user applications and services. For the past few years, she has been most active in the areas of ubiquitous and mobile computing, social media, computer mediated communication, locative media and internet/web sciences. During this time, Professor Churchill designed and evaluated enterprise and consumer-facing information/communication applications and services for desktop, mobile, tablet and large screen devices.

https://elizabethchurchill.com

https://mbzuai.ac.ae/study/faculty/elizabeth-churchill/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethfchurchill/

At this Masterclass, we will have a discussion, led by Professor Lars Erik Holmquist, about Dr. Churchill’s experience as a researcher crossing industry and academia, and working at the frontline of many of the world’s top tech companies. The session will be very interactive, and we invite everyone, in particular PhD students and early career researchers, to take part!

Hope to see you there!

Design Studios and Cosy Games at ARPPID 2025

CXL have two presentations at ARPPID 2025, a new Working Conference on Academic Research and Professional Practice in Interaction Design taking place in London on July10-11.

Lars Erik Holmquist and Sam Nemeth will present the Case Study The Design Studio of the Future: Insights from A Practical Experiment in Remote Collaboration. In this project, which was partly carried out during the Covid pandemic, we aimed to recreate the positive features of a design studio in an educational and workplace setting using distance-spanning digital technology. Inspired by Conjoint Control, we constructed realistic solutions using off-the-shelf hardware and software that afforded novel and efficient ways of blending co-located and distance collaboration. From this we learned that although much of the required hardware already exists, it is not generally being used to its full potential, and that the standard meeting software is often not fit for this kind of creative collaboration settings.

Also at ARPPID, Anh Pham and Lars Erik Holmquist will present a poster titled From Cosy Games to Metaverse: Deriving Positive Interaction Qualities through Netnography. To gain design guidelines for a more welcoming Metaverse experience, we examined cosy games, which offer a non-violent and relaxing experience. Through netnography and thematic analysis we identified two main aspects of the positive user experience: positive emotional experiences and anticipation experiences. The findings will serve as the foundation for exploring the future potential and create design frameworks for creating more inclusive Metaverse applications.