Janet’s main research areas:
She has innovated in three main areas in the general field of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and in the specialist field of CCI (Child Computer Interaction). She was the first researcher to consider how handwriting recognition technology might be designed to be useful for children. She was able to show that children’s writing could be recognised, albeit with errors, by standard recognition software but she also identified a unique problem that had not been seen with adult writing, notably the addition of delayed edit strokes (like making the stick of an h larger) that caused specific problems with the recognition algorithms. She worked with Vision Objects in France to bring this to industry.
During her PhD she realised there was a shortage pf knowledge on how best to evaluate interactive technologies with children. She developed the Fun Toolkit, a suite of child friendly easy to use products that have statistical validity and that are now the go-to tool for use with children in HCI research. The Smileyometer, a tool within this set was co-designed with children and is widely used in industry as well as in research. It features in her book on Evaluation with Children (Morgan Kauffman).
Co-design has been a defining area for her as she has sought to ensure the empowerment of children in this activity. She has studied co-design in an empirical way establishing how we can account for ideas in a democratic and representative way and have, alongside this, developed a set of tools for the ethical involvement of children in research that ensure that children are informed ‘beyond the ethics board approval’. These methods of inclusive ethical co-design have been influential in CCI and HCI and she has spoken about them at keynotes and invited lectures in Indonesia, Cyprus and India.
Janet’s work as a research leader:
In 2003 she established the Child Computer Interaction (ChiCI) group at University of Central Lancashire (UCLan). The group has since published over 300 peer reviewed papers and has completed 15 PhD students. Since 2019 she has been Director of the UCLan Research Centre for Digital Life which is allowing her a broader reach and more opportunities to work with ECRs.
She has supervised 24 students to completion at PhD level, one at MD and two to MPhil.
She has held funding from EPSRC, TSB, EU, RAEng, Royal Society and from the University. She has completed over a dozen projects, most as local PI and have worked in teams that have included many International researchers, especially on EU projects.
Janet’s work for the research community:
She is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Mobile HCI and the Journal Interacting with Computers and she is a member of the ACM SigCHi Ethics board. Within HCI she is also a reviewer for all the major conferences and has held chair roles at many conferences including general chair at six different conferences.
Her home community is the Child Computer Interaction (CCI) Community which she was instrumental in defining and establishing. This community has its own conference (ACM Interaction Design and Children) which she helped establish (ran the first conference in Preston in 2003) and which she has since brought back to the UK in 2016 when they held it in Manchester. The community also has its own journal and she is a founding editor of that journal with Prof Panos Markopoulos from Eindhoven.
Janet’s STEM work:
In 2009, she coined the term Mess (Mad Evaluation Sessions with Schoolchildren) Days to describe a way of interacting with children in their schools or in our lab in a mixture of research studies, design studies and science exploration. These events, which they now run many times a year are based on the principle of children participating with full information and without selection. Children come as a class of 30 or so and break up into small groups who each then cycle through all the activities on offer in such a way that all the children get to do each activity. This model has been shared around the world in a series of International Workshops and Courses at major HCI conferences, at invited courses in India and China and at weeklong summer schools in Finland, Spain and Singapore where she has been invited to talks about how she works with children in evaluation.
I have worked with over 5000 children on research and design projects including on several funded and unfunded citizen science projects. A new project recently funded by the Royal Society will be with a school in Clitheroe where we will work with high school children on air pollution. The children will gather data, analyse it and visualise it.
Janet’s fun facts:
She is a keen runner and skier and loves travel. She has visited Malaysia twice. She has four grown up children and a dog as well as several grandchildren She also likes sailing and good food.
