The lecture is free to attend and open to all, but registration is required in advance.
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Abstract
In 1995, Bob Spence interviewed 12 respected engineers to elicit their visions of engineering design 25 years later, in 2020. In his Peter Lindsay Lecture “2020 Visions for Engineering Design” Bob will review some of those visions to see what can be learned from them, and will present some thoughts as to how features of human cognition and perception might be triggers for new visions.
Biography
Bob Spence is Professor Emeritus of Information Engineering and a Senior Research Investigator at Imperial College London. An unusual schoolboy hobby of constructing telephone exchanges was followed by a PhD from Imperial College which, in his words “was fun, but had little influence on the Earth’s movement around the Sun”. After research in the USA he returned to Imperial College in 1962, initially concerned with circuit design and manufacture. But during the 1960s he saw the potential that the newly emerging interactive computer graphics could have for engineering design, and began research into its application to electronic circuit design. That research and development culminated in 1985 when Bob became the founding chairman of a company successfully marketing the first interactive-graphic tool for circuit design. As a result of this work he was a pioneer in the field of Human-computer Interaction and, in that context, was the co-inventor of the fisheye lens, a new notation for interactive systems, a tool for circuit design exploiting optimization algorithms, and techniques for Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. In the last couple of years, he designed the interface for a hand-held device supporting the self-management of Type-1 diabetes
His undergraduate teaching, which he enjoys, has resulted in twelve books, and he regularly presents workshops on Design for Information Visualization in Italy, Portugal, The Netherlands and elsewhere.
Bob’s research has led to the award of three higher doctorates: on Circuit Theory (University of London, 1984), Interaction Design (Royal College of Art, 1995) and Interactive Visual Artefacts (Imperial College, 2018). He was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1991.