Dr.  Ann Blandford

Ann Blandford is Professor of Human Computer Interaction at University College London. She is a member of the ACM CHI Academy and is a recipient of an IFIP TC13 Pioneer Award. She is internationally known for her research in digital health and information science. Much of her research has been empirically driven, with a strong focus on the situated use of technologies in the wild. Her early work cumulated in a suite of analytic methods for reasoning about complex systems, including DiCoT (Distributed Cognition for Teamwork) and CASSM (Conceptual Analysis for Surface and Structural Misfits) which have had widespread uptake by others.

Ann has applied these and other methods to inform the design of interactive medical devices. She has also conducted extensive studies on how to reason about technology design and deployment when it is situated within a complex adaptive system, such as an intensive care unit or someone's home. Her studies have highlighted some of the burdens of patient work and how technology can disrupt or support people in managing health conditions.

Ann is renowned for her interdisciplinary research, working closely with academia and practitioners. She has written about best practice and strategies for interdisciplinary working, particularly with health professionals.

She has also published widely on interacting with information. Whereas most previous work on information seeking focused on a single information seeking episode or task, Ann's information journey model considers information interactions over time, situated within people’s daily lives and work. Much of this work is summarized in a popular monograph on interacting with information.

Few teams internationally have studied safety-critical interactive medical devices from an HCI perspective. Even fewer have studied their use by patients as well as trained professionals. Ann has forged a path in making sense of some of the messiness of people's real interactions with various technologies in their daily lives and work.

As a discipline, HCI does not have a strong tradition of reflecting on and writing about the methods we apply in our research. Ann has written extensively about her experiences; for example, she is the lead author of a popular monograph on qualitative methods in HCI.

• An introduction to Human Factors for Health Technologies
  This session introduces approaches to designing interactive healthcare technologies that are fit for purpose: that maximise efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction for staff, and give...
• Data, Artificial Intelligence and Interaction: Explorations in Healthcare
  With the growing availability of data, many recent developments in health technologies have centred on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning over large datasets. However, healthcare is...
• Designing for system utility and conceptual fit
  People using computer systems have to work with the concepts implemented by system developers. If there is a poor fit between system concepts and the way users think about the domain...
• DiCoT: understanding complex socio-technical systems in terms of Distributed Cognition
  Distributed Cognition (DCog) is a widely used approach to reasoning about group working and the design of artefacts within work systems. It has been applied particularly in safety-critical...
• Interacting with Information

  Most studies of information seeking put the seeking activity at the center. In this talk, I present an alternative perspective: that of the person, who may be actively...

• Semi-Structured Qualitative Studies in HCI
  HCI addresses problems of interaction design: delivering novel designs, evaluating existing designs, and understanding user needs for future designs. Qualitative methods have an essential...
• Working at the interface between HCI and Health: tales of challenges and triumphs Abstract
  Novel technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, telemedicine, robotics, wearables and more, offer huge promises in healthcare  for use by clinicians, patients...