I am a media and technology researcher with an academic background in literature, screen media and software studies (St Andrews, Cambridge), and a professional background in user studies and user experience design. In my work – both at university and in the industry – I try to combine technical knowledge with cultural sensitivity to suggest new, interdisciplinary ways of approaching visual media in the age of machine learning, with a particular emphasis on the ethics of design.
My master’s thesis (Centre for Film and Screen at Cambridge) focused on choice and consciousness of the ‘viewer-user’ of online visual content in the wake of algorithmic profiling and automated personalization. I studied the interfaces of major platforms – Facebook, YouTube and Netflix – to interrogate the relationship between different UX design strategies and the user’s experience of subjective time. My PhD work at Cambridge, which traces the concepts of machine vision and machine creativity from early photography to artificial intelligence, is an expansive account of how the past and present formulations of ‘creative’ machines have shaped the history of perception.