Dr Ewan Soubutts
Departmental Lecturer
Dr Ewan Soubutts
Departmental Lecturer
(He/Him)
Ewan Soubutts is a Departmental Lecturer at the OII, specialising in Human-Centered Computing and Digital Health. He also holds Honorary Research Fellow at positions at the UCL Interaction Centre and Bristol Interaction Group in the UK. Ewan studies the intersection of technology within and between age groups in society, looking at how people provide support that is mediated via digital communication tools like smart speakers and wellness apps, allowing for individual and collective understandings of technology adoption, digital health and care challenges (such as life transitions) and information acquisition over the internet.
Ewan takes a mixed-methods approach to understanding people in human-centered studies, exploring this intersection of life stages and technology through a variety of approaches. His research has covered topics such as LGBT+ older adults’ social media marginalisation experiences, minority ethnic young people’s digital mental health needs, older people’s use of personal finance and energy technology in the cost of living crisis, and most recently, how AI-enabled social agents can empower families to provide care for one another.
Prior to joining the OII, Ewan gained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bristol and has worked as a researcher at the UCL Interaction Centre and Responsible Technology Institute at Oxford. With degree-level training in creative media, psychology and computer science, Ewan seeks to bring interdisciplinarity to his research on individual and collective intergenerational design.
As an academic, Ewan is keen on supporting networks of researchers to collaborate on human-centered computing efforts, both across the university and more widely in the academic community. Most notably, Ewan has chaired for the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) CHI conference as an associate chair in qualitative and mixed methods studies, from 2023-2026. Ewan has also run workshops on empathy-centric design (EmpathiCHI 2024), and on aging at ACM INTERACT in 2023.
Human-centered computing, Digital health and wellbeing, Intergenerational design, Sociotechnical studies, Internet of things / smart systems, Social agentics, Social media, Computer-supported cooperative work.
Areas of interest for Doctoral supervision:
Social media | Intergenerational design | Smart technology and energy | Digital health, care and wellbeing | Digital mental health | Search and sensemaking | Sociotechnical studies | Human-centered computing.
This course is designed to give students hands‐on practice gathering qualitative data and provide students with the knowledge and skills to analyse various types of qualitative data analysis collected from both online and offline settings.