Professor Thea Blackler

Biography

I am Associate Dean Research for the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, and a Professor within the School of Design at QUT. I am the world leader in intuitive interaction research and pioneered and published the first empirical work in the field, and edited a journal issue and a book on intuitive interaction. As an ECR, I led ARC DP0877964 on Facilitating Intuitive Interaction for Older People. I have worked on other projects researching older people and technology (including PhD supervisions and commercial research) and design for dementia (including an international EU Horizon project, Mindful Design for Dementia). I have also worked on interaction for gaming and for children. I am currently leading DP200100723 on Enabling Children’s Active Play using Novel Technology and DP240102717 on Designing Distanced Intergenerational Interaction with Tangible Technology, which brings together my expertise in conducting research with both older people and children and includes an international partner.

I have always worked with researchers from a range of disciplines (e.g. various clinical health disciplines, psychology, computer science, biological sciences, education, engineering) and have often acted as a bridge between HASS and STEMM researchers and a leader in mixed methods approaches. I have expanded this interdisciplinary work in recent years, providing leadership and broadening research impact with my expertise in working across disciplines and approaches. I have applied and expanded the methods I have developed over the past 20+ years to understand how real people do real things in the real world in a wide range of contexts outside of traditional design fields, so that outcomes are truly evidence-based and have lasting impact. For example, I am currently a CI on a large ($4.97M) MRFF project (BRAINS, investigating provision of support through the Internet for carers of people with brain tumours), and have just finished a large industry/RDC (Hort Innovation) project on Development of non‐destructive methods and systems for the assessment of beehive health in commercial pollination. I have also been a part of the Woolworths Centre for Child Nutrition Research, providing leadership around co-design approaches to research in nutrition and health. As a result of this extensive interdisciplinary work, I have published in design, HCI, health, science & interdisciplinary venues and been cited across 11 Scopus Subject Areas in 58 countries, showing very broad reach.

My research performance relevant to opportunity is impressive as I always had teaching and/or leadership responsibilities alongside my research workload, and earlier in my career I had a total of 2.5FTE of career interruptions. I have over $9 million in external funding and have had four ARC grants in total, three as first CI, plus one currently pending and another in prep. I have worked with partners in government, community and a wide range of industries including healthcare, aged care, childcare, agriculture, manufacturing and disaster management on various projects, large and small. I am a very experienced HDR supervisor, with 7 current HDR students and 20 HDR completions (18 PhD). I have over 110 peer reviewed publications, 2137 citations and an h index of 26, which is very high relative to disciplinary norms. I have been invited to give presentations internationally and have received several research awards.