Colin Watson

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My interests lie in digital exclusion from national and local government services, the effects of this on individuals and communities, and resultant lack of opportunity.

In my MRes Digital Civics at Open Lab I examined how to help citizens make best use of resource-limited advice and support appointments provided by local councils and charities, and in particular how to assist claimants of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) gather more accurate and impartial health assessment information to support their benefit claims. This involved co-designing PIP Kit with service users and practitioners of a local advice charity, comprising digital and non-digital components, to help people recollect how health conditions affect their own daily lives and mobility.

I hold a BSc (1st class) honours Chemical Engineering from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and a MSc Computation from Keble College, University of Oxford. My previous work experience includes manufacturing, web application development (requirements gathering, specification, system and database design, coding, usability and accessibility) and information security and privacy consulting (risk assessments, privacy impact assessments, payment card security, data retention and disposal, software security training, application security testing and building security into the software development lifecycle).

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The Interpretation of HCI

HCI as an encounter

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) turns out to be a Pandora’s Box of cross-disciplinary (Reeves, 2015) viewpoints, ideas, approaches, methods and theories, with a very wide range of potential research topics. The features of ambiguity (Gaver et al, 2003) and flexibility in how people interpret their computer technology encounters (Sengers and Gaver,