About
Experimental psychologist who builds the thing rather than describing it.
I’m an Associate Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, in Media Arts, and Senior Creative Technologist with CoSTAR and StoryFutures. I lead on inclusive and multisensory audience research, supervise eight PhD students, and line-manage a small technical team.
I started as an experimental psychologist. My PhD (Trinity College Dublin, 2004) was on multisensory perception — how the senses argue with each other, and who wins. That work carried on through Unilever R&D, Oxford’s Crossmodal Lab and around seventy papers, mostly on taste, flavour and the strange things that change them.
Somewhere in there I became the person who builds the apparatus. Ten years of Django in production. Raspberry Pi and Arduino when a question needs hardware. Six years of 3D printing, mostly for other people’s projects. Computer vision on cheap chips because the cloud version cost too much and told you less.
The through-line is that I’d rather make the thing than write about making the thing. Most of what’s on this site started as a question I couldn’t answer by reading.
Currently interested in: AI-assisted coding and what it does to the skill underneath it — I’m running a longitudinal study on exactly that at canistillcode.org. Also accessible research methods, and how much of a lab you can move into a browser tab.
I’m autistic with ADHD, which is relevant here mainly because it shapes what I build and who I build it for.