Dr Debbie Maxwell
Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media and Chair of Partnerships & Engagement & Impact Lead

Profile

Biography

My background spans computing, HCI and Design with an MEng (Hons) in Computer Systems Engineering from UMIST, Manchester, an MSc (Distinction) in Animation & Visualisation from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), University of Dundee, and a PhD in Design and Computing from DJCAD, University of Dundee, UK (“Traditional Storytelling in a Digital Society: the transformative power of storytelling across media”).

I currently teach user experience (UX) design and design methods and critical design on the BSc Interactive Media programme.

My research focuses on the roles of active storytelling and engagement in digital contexts. I’m interested in the ways that people interact with and reshape technology through stories, as both method and artefacts, and across media.

Research

Overview

My research focuses on the roles of active storytelling and engagement in digital contexts. I’m interested in the ways that people interact with and reshape technology through stories, as both method and artefacts, and across media. I explore this in a number of ways, including:

• the use of storytelling as an active process to foster empathy in and across communities of interest and practice
• the roles of stories in encoding knowledge (tacit and articulated) through oral and digital forms
• developing methods of documenting and capturing imagined futures through participatory story generation

I use an interdisciplinary approach drawing on a range of fields including Human Computer Interaction (HCI), ethnography, interaction design, social anthropology, and service design. My research always involves working with communities using participatory methods.

Currently I am exploring the potential of stories as value propositions, conceptualising stories as currency, where I hope to examine their shifting value across media and contexts, for example from traditional oral folklore to digital retellings and distributed data flows.

Projects

I am currently PI on AHRC Connected Communities research project, ‘Telling the Bees’ (£53K), March 2015 - September 2016, and was PI on ‘Skills in Action’ (2014-15), an AHRC and Creative Scotland funded ECR Skills Development programme (£10K). I have been a Co-Investigator on two networks, ‘StoryStorm’ (£15K, 2013-14), a Digital Economy Communities & Culture Network+ network; and ‘Seannachies: Addressing Social Isolation through Storytelling’ (£18K, 2014-15), a Scottish Universities Insight Institute programme. I am also Co-I on ‘Listening to Voices: Creative Disruptions with the Hearing Voices Network’ (2015-16), a £48K AHRC Connected Communities research project.