Dr Dorian Peters
Dorian is an Intellectual Forum Senior Research Associate.
She is also a Research Fellow at Imperial College London and an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge.
Dorian researchers human-computer interaction, specialising in design for digital health and wellbeing, human autonomy, and learning. Her books include: Positive Computing: Technology for Wellbeing and Human Potential (MIT Press), and Interface Design for Learning (Pearson).
She has worked in participatory digital health across age groups with communities in the UK, Australia and South America. Sitting squarely at the intersection of technology and the humanities, she often fulfils the role of cross-disciplinary bridge, helping colleagues in disparate fields work together through shared language and tools. She also acts as a bridge between research and practice by translating academic discoveries into actionable knowledge for professionals.
With over 20 years’ experience in technology design, she works together with communities, engineers, and social scientists to co-create human-centred, context-sensitive and research-driven technologies in ways that respect psychological needs. She has also done work for non-profit and corporate institutions including Movember Foundation, IESO Digital Health, Google, Atlassian, Honda, Sony and Phillips.
What are you working on now?
My current work explores how conversational AI might be leveraged to tackle health disparities in the majority world in ways that acknowledge model bias and power dynamics. I’m also interested in how technology could better support the psychological dimensions that accompany chronic illness.
How has your career to date led to this?
I’ve always worked across disciplines. I started in theatre and film directing, and moved into technology design because I love the way design melds the functional and scientific with the arts. But to be passionate about my work I also had to feel it was contributing to social good, so I embraced education initially and forged a new field in interface design for learning. Then, because I always loved health and medicine, I moved into designing with clinicians and engineers for health and psychological wellbeing. Design shapes the ways we engage with the world so it has a huge opportunity and responsibility to do so in ways that make it better.
What one thing would you most want someone to learn from what you’ve done or are doing now?
We live in a pluriverse. Different worldviews, lived experiences and ways of knowing make humanity rich and wonderful and we’ll arrive at our best world only by listening deeply and learning from each other across disciplines, cultures and epistemologies. I’ve gained so much from being embedded, as a technologist, amidst other communities—communities of educators, philosophers, doctors—but also by engaging with the ‘end-users’ of my projects, from firefighters, construction workers and teenagers with asthma to citizens in rural Peru, health professionals in Argentina and young Indigenous Australians. We have so much to learn by opening up to other ways of thinking.
What do you think of °µÍø½ûÇø and the Intellectual Forum?
As someone who gets excited by multidisciplinary ways of tackling important issues, the IF is a treasure. It benefits from all the academic richness, diversity and history of Jesus college, and then adds this layer that allows for interaction with a broader intellectual public. It’s also fair to say that the Roost is the best Cambridge College cafe bar there is.
You can meet the rest of the Intellectual Forum team or contact us via email.
