Associate Professor
Jen Seevinck

Biography

Jen Seevinck teaches at the QUT School of Design and conducts research as a chief investigator in the Design Lab and Centre for Environment and Society ; co-leads the QUT More-than-Human Futures group and is the course coordinator for the Bachelor of Creative Industries.

Jen is an internationally recognised researcher and design practitioner, pioneering new understandings for user experience and communication with computer based systems and visualisation. She is currently investigating the role of visual communication in flood risk communication and co-leading the codesign phase of a major Natural Hazards Research Award grant investigating Australian flood risk communications. She also has a current ARC Discovery concerned with advocacy for a marginalised demographic (aged care community) through interactive art practice and research. In recent and ongoing works she has collaborated with citizen scientists to design for science engagement and environmental advocacy, with research projects and artistic data visualisations created in partnership with CSIRO, QMIR and Metro Health South for public engagement with disease vectors.

Jen has developed new, multidisciplinary understanding of emergence theory, introducing it to the field of interaction design, to expanding understandings of user experience design beyond the traditional focus on usability and function - and in accordance with contemporary third wave approaches to Human Computer Interaction design. Her design practice to create data visualisation installations and applications implements this understanding, working in - and with - stakeholders, agents and places. In recent interactive data installations, she combined real time wind and water data with audience movement and gesture, to animate glass sculptural objects using servo motors; creating dynamic human/artefact behaviours and unique visual patterns in gallery spaces through to urban street scapes.

Seevinck has exhibited her interactive art at conferences and contemporary art galleries in Italy, USA, Beijing, Tokyo, and Australia, working in situ with diverse industry and community stakeholders - disability, children, scientists – to co-create inspiring, immersive and memorable interactive art experiences (see www.smArtnoise.net )