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).
Chris Speed leads the Design Informatics Research Centre where his research focuses upon the Network Society, Digital Art and Technology, and The Internet of Things. Chris is programme manager for the MA/MFA Design Informatics programmes and supervises a range of PhD across digital humanities subjects. Chris 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 jour-nals 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 ar-gument that chickens are actually robots. Chris is a co-organiser and compere for the Edin-burgh www.ThisHappened.org events 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) (http://talesofthings.com) and the related Re-search 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 (http://www.sixthsensetransport.com) funded Energy project (£900k) which explores the implications for the next generation of mobile computing for dynamic per-sonalised travel planning. He is also PI for the Travel Behaviours network (http://www.travelbehaviours.net) 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).
He is also Co-I to the Hub of All Things project http://hubofallthings.com is an EPSRC New Economic Models for the Digital Economy project that is the first of its kind that will attempt to engineer and emerge a LIVE MARKET right in the home, powered by the Internet-of-Things (IOT).
Chris has been involved in winning two Digital Economy prizes for Telling Tales of Engage-ment from both the TOTeM and Sixth Sense Transport projects. He was also awarded the University of Edinburgh Chancellors Medal in 2011 for Community Engagement, and Awarded The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) Innovator’s Prize in 2013.
