Research Overview

Richard is concerned with how new technologies shape us and how we in turn shape our technologies - in the space known as Human Computer Interaction or HCI. He has 28 patents, published over 240 articles and written or edited 20 books, including the IEEE award winning "The Myth of the Paperless Office" (2001); “Texture”, (the A.o.I.R. book of the year 2011); “Choice” (2016) and "Skyping the Family" (2019). "The Shape of Thought: reasoning in the Age of AI" (McGill-Queens Press) will be published in Spring 2025 and explores the role of AI in our current cutlural and organisational practices, as well as historically. It shows how human-computer research is far more important to the successful development of AI tools and techniques than is realised, and how the technology itself is more constrained in its effectiveness than is claimed by the AI industry.

Throughout his career he has learnt that the best innovation comes from interdisciplinary thinking. This is key to his teaching and research at Lancaster where he was director of the Leverhulme Trust Centre for Material Social Futures. This interest is similarly reflected in the Future Places Centre, funded by the EPSRC, which Richard leads as its Principal Investigator. The centre is looking at the relationship between people and places and how this relationship is shaped through various representations. These are both technological and social, material and moral. Shaping a better future for the places we inhabit thus needs interdisciplnary understandings and research.

He has won various awards and prizes. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce in 2010; the IET in 2011 and, in 2014, was elected Fellow of the ACM SIG-CHI Academy in honour of his leadership in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. More recent awards have included IISI-EUSSET Lifetime Acheivement Awards for Contributions to CSCW (2022). He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Swansea since 2016, and in 2022-23 was a Digital Futures Scholar in Residence at KTH, the Royal Insitute of Technology in Stockholme.