Professor Karen Cham
- Faculty of Business and Social Sciences
- Department of Strategy, Marketing and Innovation
- Kingston Business School
- Kingston Hill
Professor of Augmented Intelligence, Digital Transformation & Design
About
I am Co-Director of The Behavioural Research Analytics in Neurotechnological Systems (BRAINS) Lab, a collaborative research and knowledge exchange facility concerned with ethical, inclusive and sustainable digital futures. I am an internationally-recognised expert in human-centred design for VUCA socio-technical scenarios at scale. My research is in human/machine convergence, the digital transformation of values and designing for behaviour change.
Previously, at the University of Brighton, I was cross-University Professorial lead for ‘Connected Futures', a fifth of the University R&E strategy, including Digital Economies; Immersive, Simulations & Virtualisation; Complexity & Design, and Digital Health. This included two spin-offs; EmERGE mHealth, a secure blood test App I scaled across five EU countries from a £7m H2020 project and CardMedic, scaled to 42,000 users in 8 months.
As part of Digital Economies, I was Academic Lead of Brighton Digital Catapult Centre and two innovation eco-systems for SMEs. Their £1.2m 5G Brighton test bed with 5GIC as a named part of the UK Govts 5G Strategy, where I was also a Member of UK5Gs SME Working Group formulating UK-wide policy and as Principal Investigator, the £1.3m ERDF ‘Data Research Innovation Value Accelerator' big data project with Gatwick Airport in a B2B Data Innovation Lab funded by the Local Growth Fund. This led to my £28m Impact Case Study, "Transforming the digital economy by leveraging the value of data', putting the University second nationally for ‘Research Power'.
I have 35 years of experience in human-centred design (HCD), technology innovation, transformation, and computational design. Clients have included PlayStation, TopShop, Which? and Accenture. My first website, touchscreen and AI were as an experimental artist and designer of experiential marketing and in 1996, I was the Princes Youth Business Trust regional delegate to the Youth for Europe innovators conference at the EU Parliament for my microbusiness model run by ISDN. In 1998, I led the development of the first ever pan-European website for Playstation2 as Senior Account Manager at RealTime Interactive at Evans Hunt Scott in Soho Square (now Havas Worldwide) and was later seconded to BT New Media.
My academic career started in 2000 with an AHRC PhD Scholarship to SIAD, now part of University College of the Creative Arts (UCCA). My first post was in 2004 at The Open University as a Central Academic in the Design & Innovation Dept. under Prof Nigel Cross; 5* RAE and third in UK for design research after the RCA and Imperial. In 2005 I won an OU Teaching Award for creating and sustaining their first online learning community that to date has 25,000 alumni. As part of the Complexity & Design Research Cluster (Computational Design theme), I worked closely with the Knowledge Media Institute (KMI) under Professor Marc Eisenstadt on Early Careers work developing semantic computer vision ontologies for Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) that led to my honorary affiliation to the Digital Imaging Research Centre (DIRC), one of the largest clusters of computer vision scientists in Europe at Kingston University in 2008. In 2009, I led a £100k HEFCE-funded project with academics from across four faculties at Kingston for the DMK Masters suite of six courses that runs as a micro-studio to deliver live projects, currently 250 students 22/23.
I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Women In Games Ambassador sponsored by Google Women Tech Makers, and a Non-Executive Director and Trustee of NEST, the UK government's £24bn pension with 12m users, the largest FinTech transformation of its kind in the world.
Qualifications
- PG Diploma in Qualitative Research Methods (2001)
- NVQ3 Digitally Integrated Media (1995)
- BA (Hons) Fine Art. Special Commendation in History & Theoretical Studies (1991)