Lansdown Centre

Stephen Boyd Davis has worked and taught in digital media since 1984.

Stephen’s Links

Microsoft Academic Search

Middlesex University e-Repository

Academia.edu

Interaction Design.org

At Middlesex with Gordon Davies he founded one of the first Masters programmes in the world dealing with interactive media. Graduates of the programme have influenced interactive media worldwide.

He runs the Lansdown Centre, a University Research Centre dedicated to innovative work in digital media. He shares the Centre's commitment to continuous innovation – but also sets new media practices in wider historical contexts.

His aim has always been to inquire radically into the possibilities of media and technologies, exploiting their special properties to the full.

In addition to running the Research Centre and teaching, Stephen supervises innovative PhD projects, developing new, creative applications for technology.

Stephen is a member of the Peer Review College of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, a Referee on the Scientific Committee of the Design Research Society, and and on the management committee of the Computer Arts Society. He is a peer reviewer for SIGCHI and for Interacting with Computers.

Research Interests

Spatialised media

This research theme has two aspects. The first centres on the new possibilities created by mobile media devices – pervasive technologies for distributing the use of media across wide spaces. For example, Ere be Dragons (see Research Projects) was a project funded by the Wellcome Trust which was a world-first in combining location-aware PDAs and heart-rate sensing, enabling players to explore both the external space they inhabit and the internal space of their own body processes. Accepted for the prestigious ACM international exhibition of Multimedia Art in Singapore 2005, this project is discussed by Stephen and the project partners in several conference papers, journal articles and book chapters (see Publications, below). Impacts of this work have included: public trials in Nottingham (Radiator Festival), London, Singapore, Berlin in addition to academic events in Dublin, Glasgow, Bristol, Sao Paolo and Japan. Further developed by the Mixed Reality Lab at Nottingham as Heartlands, Ere be Dragons has gone on to win the international prize Nokia Ubimedia Mindtrek award and the national Galileo Masters Satellite Navigation Award. The aim was to engage players with their own body processes with a view to tackling attitudes to exercise and fitness: evaluation of trials with the public showed this intention was fulfilled, leading in turn to medical interest and invitation to contribute to a handbook on information technology in healthcare. Project page.

Building on the experience of Ere be Dragons Stephen developed with his colleagues a new approach to locative media in the Scratch project for BBC Radio Drama. This focusses on the translocational: locative media which use space without being tied to any particular place. The impacts for the BBC project have been: a public workshop as part of BBC FreeThinking 2007 and a full public participation/performance with the BBC of translocational drama Scratch for FreeThinking 2008, both in Liverpool (the latter as part of the European Capital of Culture celebrations). To promote discussion of the beneficial economic implications of translocational media in addition to the creative potential, a trial was also arranged for BBC executives from several divisions, held in Regents Park early in 2009. Project page.

Depiction and Representation

A second strand to Stephen’s work on spatialised media concerns the uses of space in depiction and visualisation. He has developed a unique integrated approach to depiction which begins to provide an account of the huge range of graphical depictions across cultures, through history and across media including painting, photography, film, television and interactive media. The model of depiction is a pragmatic one, undermining any simple concept of visual realism. Several papers in Publications (see panel at right) are on this theme, as is Stephen’s 2002 PhD. Project page.

Chronographics

Also under the theme of spatialisation, Stephen has developed innovative work on the visualisation of historic time. Following a pilot project investigating the use of virtual environments as an aid to understanding historical time, with Prof. Nigel Foreman of the University’s School of Health and Social Science, the two were granted a £70,000 Leverhulme Award to support the work of a PhD student, Liliya Korallo (now Dr. Korallo), investigating the effects on school children and undergraduates of different forms of historic visualisation. This led to a number of scientific publications, including an article for Instructional Science (see panel at right to access more details). Such interdiscipinary cross-overs are typical of Stephen’s work.

In the latest stage of this work, Stephen’s personal research has focussed on the pioneering eighteenth century figures, Joseph Priestley and Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg. Papers arising include Just In Time: defining historical chronographics for Electronic Visualisation and the Arts: EVA London 2010 and Time Machines for Computers and the History of Art 2010: Technology and ‘the death of Art History’. See panel at right to access more on these papers. He is working towards an agenda for digital timelines, inspired by these early pioneers: whereas they has ideas but inappropriate technology (paper and ink), the opportunities opened by digital technology have not been matched by the quality of ideas. Project page.

Human Computer Interaction

Stephen has pioneered approaches to human-computer interaction which go beyond the utilitarian approaches of software engineering. He originally trained as a textile designer, and an interest in designing for pleasure as much as for use has continued throughout his career.

Until recently, studies of human computer interaction concentrated on the basic usability of functional software tools. The growth of other kinds of interactive computing, such as games, has made people recognise the need to think much more broadly about the experience of interacting with digital machines. There is also a need for new ways of evaluating the quality of human computer interaction: Stephen has applied unusual techniques such as a Repertory Grid approach to this problem. To develop this work he created the Landsown Centre’s Usability and Evaluation workshop, one of only two such facilities within an Art and Design area in the UK. Several papers in Stephen’s Publications (see panel at right) discuss these themes.

Important recent work in this category includes finding appropriate evaluation methods for novel media experiences. In this connection, Stephen undertook the evaluation process for the locative drama work for the BBC. A multi-strategy approach was adopted, balancing the benefits of quanitative results from surveys with those of in-depth study which tend to be more useful in the creative process.

This issue of the kinds of evaluation that are are useful in creative work was developed in a 2009 symposium which Stephen developed and ran, supported by the Design Research Socitey and the Computer Arts Society of the BCS. See Project page. An international programme committee selected the work and the best papers were then revised for a Special Issue of the journal Digital Creativity: 20(3). Summer 2009.

Art and Design Research and Education

Since the 1980s Stephen has worked to make computing an integral part of art and design education. In 1987 he was a founder member of the first UK Association for Computing in Art and Design Education. He has contributed papers, presentations and workshop talks on design education at international events, calling in particular for better integration of the traditions of the Art School and of science. Some of these papers can be found under Publications.

Most recently he was co-creator and co-chair of an ESRC workshop series on new forms of doctorate. With an emphasis on practice-led and multimodal research, the workshops have led to a commission from Sage for Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses. Project page.

Before Middlesex

Before working at Middlesex, Stephen worked at Winchester School of Art, Hampshire, and at Barnet College, North London. He moved to Middlesex University in 1988 where he headed a small unit advising lecturers across the UK on using computers in Art and Design. In 1993, he and his colleagues developed one of the world’s first courses in Design for Interactive Media, which is still highly successful. In 2005, Stephen became Head of the Lansdown Centre. The Curriculum Leader for Media Arts is Patrick Phillips.