Hello and welcome to my online portfolio. I am a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) / UX designer and researcher, Lecturer in Games Art and Tech, industry mentor and consultant, and occasional LARPer. I have been researching-by-design user experience in and interfaces of Mixed Reality systems (VR, haptics, and AR) since 2005, and have published widely in the field of HCI. If you have a research idea that pushes boundaries in immersive tech design / social innovation and you are looking to collaborate, drop me an email.
'Reviving' the past in different ways using Mixed Reality has been a a big part of my work. I am interested in design processes of MR experiences. I am currently drawing on dramaturgy and ceremonial magic, with embodied interaction at the centre, to inspire my design. I maintain a podcast on Mixed Reality in Cultural Heritage here.
Projects
Teaching
I teach Games User Interface design and player experience, games programming (Python/Pygame), Art thinking for games, and Concept Communication at the BA and MA in Games Design courses at Brunel University London. In my teaching practice I am interested in making creative practice an integral part of learning and I seek to create inclusive learning spaces of emergent creativity. Examples are cardboard hacking to envision body-based game interfaces, quick game concept design based on news magazines, surrealist techniques to develop concepts. In 2020/21 I co-led a remote learning pilot for creative subjects with students from the University of Tampere, Human-Technology course.
cardboard hacking
remote workshops with students from other Universities
Publications
Dima, M., & Maples, H. (2021). Affectual Dramaturgy for Augmented Reality Immersive Heritage Performance. Body, Space & Technology, 20(1), 25-36. doi:10.16995/bst.368
Deniozou, T., Dima, M., & Cox, C. (2020). Designing a Game to Help Higher Education Students Develop Their Note-Taking Skills. In CHI PLAY '20: Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (pp. 181-192). Virtual. doi:10.1145/3410404.3414230
Dima, M. (forthcoming). Augmented Reality experience design through the lenses of dramaturgy in the context of cultural heritage. Routledge Studies in Museum and Cultural Heritage.
Dima, M., & Cantinho, B. (2017). Erehwon: A Digital Platform for Empowering Sociopolitical Interventions in Public Space. In E. Pereen, R. Celikates, J. de Kloet, & T. Poell (Eds.), Global Cultures of Contestation Mobility, Sustainability, Aesthetics & Connectivity (pp. 241-262). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-
63982-6
Terracciano, A., Dima, M., Carulli, M., & Bordegoni, M. (2017). Mapping Memory Routes: a Multisensory Interface for Sensorial Urbanism and Critical Heritage Studies. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI EA '17. doi:10.1145/3027063.3052958
Dima, M., Kastilo, L., & Narasimhan, N. (2016). Women who code for social change. In I.Papadimitriou, A. Prescott, & J. Rogers (Eds.), Engineering the Future Digital Design Weekend 2016. Uniform Communications Ltd..
Dima, M. (2016). Value and Audience Relationships: Tate’s Ticketed Exhibitions 2014–15. Tate Papers, (25).
Dima, M., Hurcombe, L., & Wright, M. (2014). Touching the past: Haptic Augmented Reality for Museum Artefacts. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 8526 (pp. 3-14). Heraklion, Crete, Greece. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-07464-1_1
Dima, M. (2013). Engaging theatre audiences before the play: The design of playful interactive storytelling experiences. In ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. doi:10.1145/2557595.2557600
Dima, M. (2012). Mobile Stories: Motivating theatre audiences through interactive storytelling. M. Dima, R. Coyne, & M. Wright (Eds.), University of Edinburgh.
Dima, M., Wright, M., & Lee, J. (2011). A haptically-augmented interface for digital character animation. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 Posters on - SA '11. Hong Kong. doi:10.1145/2073304.2073331
Dima, M., Lee, J., & Wright, M. (2010). Exploration of direct bi-manual interaction in digitally mediated stop-motion animation. In NordiCHI 2010: Extending Boundaries - Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 635-638). doi:10.1145/1868914.1868992
Biggs, S., Dima, M., Ekeus, H., Hawksley, S., Timmons, W., & Wright, M. (2009). The 'H' in HCI: Enhancing perception of interaction through the performative. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) Vol. 5622 LNCS (pp. 3-12). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-02771-0_1
Dima, M., Arvind, D. K., Lee, J., & Wright, M. (2008). Haptically extended augmented prototyping. In Proceedings - 7th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2008, ISMAR 2008 (pp. 169-170). doi:
10.1109/ISMAR.2008.4637350
Artwork
It has been a decade of experimentation with making wall compositions out of mdf wood. I create these in Adobe Illustrator, laser cut and paint them. It's not something I do often, that's why there are only 3 of them in the span of 10 years!