About Me

I’m an interaction designer in the Socio-Digital Systems group, part of Computer Mediated Living in Microsoft Research’s Cambridge facility, based in the UK.

Recent Activity

• May 2009. Made a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA).
• January 2009. Speaker at PSFK’s Good Ideas Salon in London. View my talk.
• November 2008. Speaker at Vort-Ex 2008, a fully online conference about Microsoft technologies.
• November 2008. Part of review committee for CHI 2009 and TEI 2009.
• October 2007. Keynote Speaker at the Italy leg (Milan) of Microsoft’s design-focused Expression Around the Clock event. (My thoughts on the event are here).
• September 2007. Doctoral Colloqium Panel Member at ECSCW 2007in Limerick, Ireland. Also showed BubbleBoard as part of the conferences demo track. (My thoughts on the conference are here).
• July 2007. Speaker at the International Energy Agencies workshop on Energy Efficient Set-Top Boxes & Digital Networks. Presented a vision for consumer electronics in 2007.
• May 2007. One of three judges for the Student Design Competition at CHI 2007. (my summary is here).
• February 2007. Presented work of the team to members of the press and to Microsoft employees at Microsoft Research’s annual TechFest. (my summary is here).
• November 2006. Presented work of the team to Matti Vanhanen (the Prime Minister of Holland), Janez Potocnik(European Union Commissioner of Science and Technology) and other members of the European Parliament at Microsoft’s Innovation Day event in Brussels (see my summary here).

Research Interests

I’m working primarily with Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper on the design of new user experiences for people’s everyday lives. With others in this interdisciplinary team we’re focussed on the reality of life. It’s complex, frantic and unique to each individual and family, and traditional software and technology solutions don’t usually fit smoothly into it. We’re looking at ways in which technology can fit into the complexities of life, rather then insisting on the reverse.

In addition to project work I maintain a blog about technology trends. This primarily contains pointers and extracts from articles about new technologies and the ways in which people are using them.

Background

My educational background is in design, first of products then software. I have an MA in Computer Related Design (now Interaction Design) from the Royal College of Art in London, and a BSc in Industrial Design from Brunel University. I was recently made a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).

I’ve spent the last 10 years primarily working on products such as Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. This has taught me a great deal about the product development process from the point of view of design. Most recently I worked on new models for organizing and managing files within Microsoft Vista, after which I spent a couple of years doing longer term user experience research for the Windows team here in the UK.

Papers

• Lindley, S., Banks, R., Harper, R., Jain, A., Regan, T., Sellen, A., Taylor. A.  Resilience in the face of innovation: Household trials with BubbleBoard. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol. 67, Issue 2, Pages 154-164.
• Kirk, D., Banks, R. On the Design of Technology Heirlooms. SIMTech ‘208.
• Banks, R., Regan, T., Harper, R. and Sellen, A. BubbleBoard: A visual answering machine. ECSCW ‘07.

Patents Granted:

• 7,181,463: System & Method for Managing Data Using Static Lists. Feb 2007.
• 7,162,466: System & Method for Filtering and Organizing Items Based on Common Elements. Jan 2007.
• 7,162,488: Systems, Methods, and User Interfaces for Storing, Searching, Navigating, and Retrieving Electronic Information. Jan 2007.
• 7,149,729: System & Method for Filtering and Organizing Items Based on Common Elements. Dec 2006.
• 6,990,637: Graphical User Interface for 3-Dimensional View of a Data Collection Based on an Attribute of the Data. Jan 2006.
• 6,983,271: Answer Wizard Drop-Down Control. Jan 2006.
• 6,948,135: method & Systems of Providing Information to Computer Users. Sep 2005.
• D507,576 Portion of a Display Screen. Jul 2005.
• D501,483: Portion of a Display Screen. Feb 2005.
• 6,579,324: Method for Indicating A Selected Region on a Computer Display While Allowing the User to See the Formatting of the Background and Content Items Within the Selected region. Jun 2003.

Patents Pending:

• System & Method for Displaying Stack Icons.
• File System for Displaying Items of Different Types and from Different Physical Locations.
• System & Method for Dynamically Generating a Selectable Search Extension.
• Virtual Address Bar User Interface Control.
• System & Method Utilizing Virtual Folders.
• Stack Icons Representing Multiple Objects.
• Filtering a Collection of Items.
• File System Shell.
• Methods and Systems of Providing Information to Computer Users.
• Non-Persistent User Interface for Realtime Communication.

Personal

I maintain a personal blog.
I have a daughterwho was born at the end of ‘05 and who’s a doll.
I enjoy photography, particularly of architecture.
I enjoy travel with my wife.
If you want to buy me anything nice, go here.