Chris Speed

Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He has a BA in Alternative Practice (Brighton Polytechnic, 1992), a Masters in Design (Goldsmiths 1999), and a PhD from Plymouth University (‘A Social Dimension to Digital Architectural Practice’, 2007).

For Design Informatics, Chris’s research focuses upon the Network Society, Digital Art and Technology, and The Internet of Things. He has sustained a critical enquiry into how network technology can engage with the fields of art, design and social experience through a variety of international digital art exhibitions, funded research projects, books journals and conferences. At present Chris is working on funded projects that engage with the flow of food across cities, an internet of cars, turning printers into clocks and a persistent argument that chickens are actually robots. Chris is a co-organiser and compére for the www.ThisHappened.org events in Edinburgh and is co-editor of the journal Ubiquity.

Chris was PI for the TOTeM project investigating social memory within the ‘Internet of Things’, funded by the Digital Economy (£1.4m) and the related Research in the Wild grant: Internet of Second Hand Things; PI for the JISC-funded iPhone app Walking Through Time that overlays contemporary Google maps with historical maps; PI for Community Web2.0: creative control through hacking, a £40K feasibility study that explores parallels between virtual society (Internet) and actual society (communities); Co-I to the Sixth Sense Transport RCUK funded Energy project (£900k) which explores the implications for the next generation of mobile computing for dynamic personalised travel planning.

Chris is also PI for the Travel Behaviours network funded by the RCUK Energy theme (£140k) and Co-I to both the EPSRC Creating trust through digital traceability project (Hull) and Learning Energy Systems project (Edinburgh).