Dr Daniela Petrelli

Dr Daniela Petrelli

Reader in Interaction Design
Art & Design Research Centre
E-mail: d.petrelli@shu.ac.uk
Phone: 0114 225 6946
Fax: 0114 225 6931

My research is in Interaction Design, i.e. how should digital technology be designed to better fit people’s life. Computers were invented to solve complex mathematical problems and they have been designed with the office in mind. Starting with mobile phones and digital cameras, digital technology is now creeping up in our personal life, but the conception and design is still rooted in criteria of work efficiency and effectiveness, ignoring pleasure and affection, two fundamental values for our well-being. I think that interaction design should focus on human values more than on tasks to be carried out, it should be human-centred, instead of user-centred. I find domestic spaces and mundane activities particularly interesting settings, they are material for design: simple, even banal, but at the same time complex and nuanced. Homes are very different and individual as are the lives of those who live within, but in them we all carry out very common activities like chatting, eating or playing.

I use ethnography-inspired techniques to better understand people’s own world, not as an outsider looking in, but through their own eyes and in their own terms. Often I leave people with creative activities as inspiration, e.g. make a time capsule or sound-record one’s holiday. The outcome is always surprising, inspiring and extremely rich. At this point I become a scientist, dissecting and analysing, classifying and clustering data to make sense of the complex network of meanings and values that compose the fabric of everyday life. My design then germinates out of this understanding of the intimacy occurring between the people and their space.

Video FM Radio (Caption to say: The Family Memory Radio done in collaboration with Microsoft Research, Cambridge (UK) presented at CHI 2010)
My current research is on autobiographical memories. Memories serve to build the sense of self, to connect with our past, and sustain relationships. Autobiographical memories are both individual and social, in the mind and in the objects, and connect past and present. Aging and memories are tightly related and older people often feel the need to pass family history on to the next generation. How to make digital mementos tangible and present in people’s life so that they can be easily re-encountered and cultivated is an open research question for interaction design.

What inspires me?

I have always been fascinated by both art and science. I find poetics in science as much as in art: setting up an experiment, running it and analysing the results makes me wonder as much as discovering hidden meanings in a piece of art. I still remember the excitement more than 20 years ago when I discovered the Fibonacci sequence in a piece of Mario Mertz. And the most recent and less subtle connection of art and technology in Banksy’s “Girl at the Windows”.

Caption: “Girl at the Windows” exhibited at ‘Banksy versus Bristol Mudseum’ in 2009. The image is not great, I know, I forgot the camera and used my phone, but it is good enough to get a sense of it. The Windows message reads “A system error has occurred: Cancel – Re-try?”)

For quite a long time art and science have been kept apart in my life with science as a profession and art as a personal passion. In my current research I am trying to reconcile the two: I see creativity and science as motivating and challenging one another pushing the boundary of human-centred design in the process of creation.