
Publications by year
PhD (Mechanical Engineering Design) (Stanford University), Masters (Technology Policy) (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), BSc.Eng (Hons) (Bristol University)
Margot Brereton
Margot Brereton is a national and international leader in the collaborative design of new humanitarian technologies and their interfaces. She designs with real user communities whose needs are typically overlooked in technology development. She has focused on better futures for and the agency of older people, people with intellectual disabilities, connecting people to nature, and fostering use of endangered indigenous languages.
Margot works with particular communities in long term engagements over several years to ensure that designs fit into people’s lives in positive ways with people shaping their evolution. Margot’s approach, which focuses on tangibles, connected interfaces, AI and machine learning technologies, leads to innovative designs and new theoretical understandings and methods in the field of Human-Computer Interaction.
Margot is Professor of Engineering and Interaction Design in QUT’s School of Computer Science and Director, Research Performance at QUT’s Institute for Future Environments. She has served on the Australian Research Council College of Experts. Margot has raised over $6 million in competitive grant funding, published more than 230 fully peer-reviewed papers and supervised 14 PhD students to completion. She began her career as an apprentice at Rolls Royce aircraft engines and holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering Design from Stanford University.
Broad area of research:Human-Computer Interaction, Participatory Design, Interaction Design, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Design Methods, Ubiquitous Computing, Socio-technical Systems
Additional information
DO YOU NEED RESEARCH EXPERIENCE? I NEED GOOD RESEARCH STUDENTS. I currently supervise 6 wonderful PhD students and 2 post-docs. If you are interested in PhD, honours, Masters or postdoctoral research study, please contact me. In particular I am looking for students to work and to train in research on the funded projects below. Scholarships are available for qualified candidates. If you have skills/interests in design, user-centeed research, tangible interaction, visualisation, ethnographic research, participatory design, electronics design, app development, IT or software engineering, and want to further develop your research skills through higher degree research, please do get in touch.
- HUMAN INTERACTION WITH AI AND MACHINE LEARNING:
Our goal Is to change the design of machine learning and AI systems so that humans and machines use their different abilities to learn together for mutual benefit – human-machine teaming. Machine learning has been commoditised in areas such as medical image reading, however it typically operates separately from humans, supplanting human skills and leading to deskilling. Using human-computer interaction research techniques, co-design and iterative prototyping we aim to devise and evaluate exemplar systems that support humans to interactively frame problems, explore and learn, while utilising and improving machine models, leading to a guiding framework for designing human-machine teaming. Domains of investigation are radiology training, environmental monitoring, and children’s learning. - AMBIENT NATURE NETWORK – NEW TECHNOLOGIES TO CONNECT PEOPLE TO AND THROUGH NATURE: This project aims to reconnect people with nature through new technology. Events in nature occur at times, places and scales that are hard to witness, leading to human disconnection from nature. This project proposes to address this issue by researching and designing new low-cost devices that combine environmental sensors with new interfaces to reveal local nature in parks and gardens in calm, engaging ways within and between homes in medium and high density environments. Outcomes will include new connected devices, playful interfaces and social sharing mechanisms, an evaluation with local groups, and a new theory of technology supported human-nature interaction. Benefits will include better community connection to nature, engagement in local citizen science, environmental initiatives and novel monitoring services and products.
- CO-DESIGNING ACTIVITIES AND TECHNOLOGIES TO REVITALISE AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES: This project aims to understand how an Australian Indigenous language, Kuku Yalanji, is used across inter-generational settings and how to foster its use in everyday activities and with technologies. Many Indigenous languages, primarily spoken by Elders in small communities, risk being lost in a few decades together with the rich knowledge and cultural identity they embody. This project will use a community co-design research approach to understand language use and barriers and co-create new technologies and activities for everyday language use. Outcomes will be new knowledge about language use and revitalisation in small communities, new language tools, and Indigenous proto-enterprises at the intersection of culture, language and design. Other Australian languages may be considered.
- MAKE AND CONNECT: ENABLING PEOPLE TO CONNECT THROUGH THEIR THINGS: The Internet of Things promises a future in which everyday objects are all connected to the internet enabling them to share data and communicate with one another. The vision is technology centric and the technology is difficult to build. We will research how internet enabled things can be designed and built by everyone young and old, with a domain focus on enabling social engagement and connectedness of older people and distributed families through new forms of connectedness. Outcomes will be new toolkits, a theoretical model, and example networks of objects connecting people in new ways.
- NEW INFORMATION ACCESS AND SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES FOR PEOPLE WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY: This project aims to co-design new interfaces and algorithms for information seeking with people with intellectual disabilities, creating web search technologies that are accessible to all. Information access is key to independence in making choices in everyday living, however it is still not possible for many people with intellectual disability in Australia. The project will demonstrate the value of diversity in IT design processes by engaging users with intellectual disability in all steps of the process, through interviews, focus groups and iterative prototype testing. Outcomes will be new, inclusive search technologies and social technologies, and a new theoretical framework characterising the new forms of inclusive interactive social search. This project will result in new technologies for searching information and socialising on the web that will improve quality of life of people living with intellectual disability, providing independence and social and cultural integration. It will generate new search engine algorithms and new interfaces that will benefit all users of search engines still struggling to abstract their information needs to suit current technologies, and demonstrate the value of diversity in inclusive design.
My Experience
- Discipline Leader – Computer Human Interaction at Queensland University of Technology
- Recipient of 10 Australian Research Council grants.
- 230 peer reviewed research publications
- Deployment of innovative long term functioning prototypes in several communities e.g Nnub digital noticeboard system, Rhub group mobile social software, and to come…. the Messaging Kettle (or Messaging Rice Cooker, or Message Sticks) which will be deployed to connect families between UK and Australia, within Indonesia and within Aboriginal families in Australia
- 13 PhD and 2Masters students graduated (6 from University of Queensland (my former workplace) and 9 from QUT) (Aloha May Ambe, Ravihansa Rajapakse, Haziq Abdullah, Ben Matthews, Jared Donovan, Clint Heyer, Fiona Redhead, Tim Cederman-Haysom, Brett Campbell, Ellya Zulhaikha, Hadi Mirisaee, Steve Snow, Amirudin Wahab, Irith Williams, Kate Vaisutis)
- Chair of OzCHI, Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 2010, 2017
- OzCHI Doctoral Colloquium Responder/Chair, 2006-2009 , 2011, 2012, 2019
- Chief Investigator, ARC Centre for the Digital Child, Key Researcher in the CRC for Interaction Design.
- Reviewing: ACM CHI, conference on Computer Human Interaction; PDC Participatory Design, DIS Designing Interactive Systems; Journal of Computer Supported Co-operative Work; OzCHI; The International Journal of Research in Engineering Design; Design Studies; ASME Design Theory and Methodology; CoDesigning; Design of Augmented Reality; Environments; DesignExpertise; Designing User Experience (DUX); ISWC (International Symposium on Wearable Computing); AUIC. European Commission.
- 2004 – Present: Member of the Editorial Board, CoDesign.
- ACM CHI Best paper award 2014
- Type
- Academic Honours, Prestigious Awards or Prizes
- Reference year
- 2019
- Details
- QUT STEMM (Science, Tech, Eng, Maths, Medicine) Diversity and Inclusion Award
- Type
- Academic Honours, Prestigious Awards or Prizes
- Reference year
- 2019
- Details
- Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Research and Teaching
- Type
- Academic Honours, Prestigious Awards or Prizes
- Reference year
- 2017
- Details
- QUT Innovation Award - the messaging kettle
- Type
- Academic Honours, Prestigious Awards or Prizes
- Reference year
- 2015
- Details
- Association oF Computer Machinery (ACM) Computer Human Interaction 2014 Best Paper Award: Brereton, M., Roe, P., Schroeter, R., & Lee Hong, A. (2014, April). Beyond ethnography: engagement and reciprocity as foundations for design research out here. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 1183-1186). ACM. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/72128/4/72128(pub).pdf
- Type
- Academic Honours, Prestigious Awards or Prizes
- Reference year
- 2015
- Details
- Association oF Computer Machinery (ACM) Computer Human Interaction 2014 Honorable Mention Award: Rogers, Y., Paay, J., Brereton, M., Vaisutis, K. L., Marsden, G., & Vetere, F. (2014, April). Never too old: engaging retired people inventing the future with MaKey MaKey. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 3913-3922). ACM. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/72109/
- Type
- Academic Honours, Prestigious Awards or Prizes
- Reference year
- 2014
- Details
- 2004 University of Queensland Enhancement of Student Learning Award
- Soro A, Brereton M, Taylor J, Lee Hong A, Roe P, (2016) Cross-cultural dialogical probes, Proceedings of the First African Conference on Human Computer Interaction p114-125
- Brereton M, Sitbon L, Abdullah M, Vanderberg M, Koplick S, (2015) Design after design to bridge between people living with cognitive or sensory impairments, their friends and proxies, CoDesign p4-20
- Snow S, Rittenbruch M, Brereton M, (2015) Prototyping the self-authored video interview: Challenges and opportunities, Human-Computer Interaction - INTERACT 2015: 15th IFIP TC 13 International Conference, Proceedings, Part II [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 9297] p150-158
- Light A, Brereton M, Roe P, (2015) Some notes on the design of 'world machines', Proceedings of the 27th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference (OzCHI 2015) p289-293
- Brereton M, Soro A, Vaisutis K, Roe P, (2015) The messaging kettle: Prototyping connection over a distance between adult children and older parents, Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems p713-716
- Brereton M, Roe P, Schroeter R, Lee Hong A, (2014) Beyond ethnography: engagement and reciprocity as foundations for design research out here, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems p1183-1186
- Cottman-Fields M, Brereton M, Wimmer J, Roe P, (2014) Collaborative extension of biodiversity monitoring protocols in the bird watching community, Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Industry Cases, Workshop Descriptions, Doctoral Consortium papers, and Keynote abstracts - Volume 2 p111-114
- Vaisutis K, Brereton M, Robertson T, Vetere F, Durick J, Nansen B, Buys L, (2014) Invisible connections: investigating older people's emotions and social relations around objects, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems p1937-1940
- Brereton M, (2013) Habituated objects: everyday tangibles that foster the independent living of an elderly woman, Interactions p20-24
- Cottman-Fields M, Brereton M, Roe P, (2013) Virtual birding: extending an environmental pastime into the virtual world for citizen science, Proceedings of the 31st Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems p2029-2032
- Title
- Human-Machine Teaming:Designing Synergistic Learning of Humans and Machines
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- DP200103582
- Start year
- 2020
- Keywords
- Title
- Ambient Nature Network: New Technologies to Connect People to Nature
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- DP190101647
- Start year
- 2019
- Keywords
- Title
- ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child (ACDC)
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- CE200100022
- Start year
- 2021
- Keywords
- early childhhood;longitudinal study;digital engagement;professional development;digital practice
- Title
- New Information Access Technologies for People with Intellectual Disability
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- LP160100800
- Start year
- 2016
- Keywords
- Title
- Make and Connect: Enabling People to Connect through their Things
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- DP150104001
- Start year
- 2015
- Keywords
- Human-Computer Interaction;Participatory Design;User-centred Design
- Title
- Earth Soundscapes:A Human-computer Approach to Environmental Sound Analysis
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- DP170104004
- Start year
- 2017
- Keywords
- Title
- Bio-Acoustic Observatory: Engaging Birdwatchers to Monitor Biodiversity by Collaboratively Collecting and Analysing Big Audio Data
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- DP140102325
- Start year
- 2014
- Keywords
- Computer Human Interaction;Crowd Sourcing;Interaction Design and Communities
- Title
- Digital noticeboards for remote Aboriginal communities: bringing web 2.0 participation to non-western cultures with low English and technical literacy
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- LP120200329
- Start year
- 2012
- Keywords
- Noticeboard;Aboriginal Information System;Interaction Design;Participatory Web
- Title
- Cooperation and Reciprocity at the Local Scale Enabled by Social and Mobile Technologies: An Empirically Derived Theoretical Framework
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- DP110105127
- Start year
- 2011
- Keywords
- Human-Computer Interaction Participatory Design Community Informatics
- Title
- Sociophysical Interactions: Understanding the Role of Social and Tangible Technologies in Maintaining Good Habits into Old Age
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- DP110101999
- Start year
- 2011
- Keywords
- Human Computer Interaction;Human-Centred Design;Social Technologies;Ageing;User Experience;Embedded Interactions;Tangible Technologies
- Leveraging Social Media to Co-Design Support for Developing Life Skills among Young Adults with Intellectual Disability
PhD, Principal Supervisor
Other supervisors: Professor Paul Roe, Associate Professor Laurianne Sitbon, Dr Bernd Ploderer - Engaging Citizen Scientists in Ecological Acoustics Through Participatory Design
PhD, Associate Supervisor
Other supervisors: Professor Paul Roe - Exploring and Co-designing Emerging Technologies to Enhance the Reading Experience of Namibian Children while Preserving Indigenous Stories
PhD, Principal Supervisor
Other supervisors: Dr Alessandro Soro - Future Conversations in Future Cities: A framework for civic participation in urban transformation demonstrated through the use of Augmented Reality
PhD, Mentoring Supervisor
Other supervisors: Dr Alessandro Soro, Associate Professor Ross Brown, Professor Kevin Desouza - Co-designing engaging multimodal technologies with people with intellectual disability and their support networks
PhD, Associate Supervisor
Other supervisors: Associate Professor Laurianne Sitbon, Dr David Ireland
- Making Collaborations to Design Personalised Technologies with People with an Intellectual Disability (2018)
- Technology-Based Intervention for Supporting the Development of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (2018)
- Virtual Birding: Extending Birdwatching to Review Acoustic Recordings (2017)
- Beyond Energy Savings: Exploring How Design Can Extend the Scope of Eco-Feedback for Users in the Home (2015)
- Collaborative Learning in the Rural Indonesian Craft Industry (2014)
- Human-centred methods for design of mobile social technologies: a case study of agile ridesharing (2014)
- Designing for Participation in Local Suburban Communications (2013)