Dr Chris Elsden is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Service Design. He is a design researcher, with a background in sociology, and expertise in the human experience of data-driven services and the cultural economy. Using and developing innovative design research methods, his work undertakes diverse, qualitative and often speculative engagements with participants to investigate emerging relationships with technology – particularly data-driven tools, FinTech and blockchain technologies. In so doing, he hopes to reveal the many nuanced relationships people and organisations have with digital technology in their everyday lives, and use these insights to identify new and future opportunities for design.

Recent major research projects include: the interdisciplinary EPSRC Next Stage Centre DeCaDE (£3.8m, Co-I), investigating the decentralised digital economy; and Children’s Digital Money Futures, in partnership with Natwest Group, undertaking participatory design research with children and young people to explore their contemporary experiences of digital money.

Previously, Chris was a Post-doctoral Researcher on the AHRC Creative Informatics project, and the EPSRC OxChain project. His earlier doctoral research at Open Lab, Newcastle University considered the human implications of self-tracking tools as new ‘technologies of memory’, and outlined opportunities to design new forms of ‘documentary informatics’. He has published more than 40 research papers at leading HCI venues, as well as publishing in interdisciplnary journals (e.g. Big Data and Society, Journal of Cultural Economy) and edited collections.

Dr. Elsden is also Co-Director for the MSc in Service Management and Design, at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, where he teaches interdisciplinary courses in service design, co-creation and participatory methods, and welcomes inquiries from prospective MSc or PhD students.

Current PhD Students:

Emma Dorfman
Kourosh Khalilian
Christine O’Dell

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=eOm_WDkAAAAJ&hl=en?