About John

John Knight

Doctoral Candidate – Service Design Practice

Department of Design, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, FINLAND

I studied at Newport College of Art in the early 1980s under Roy Ascott – who is a pioneering artist using networked technology. Then I worked in the creative industries for fourteen years before taking a year out to study Human-computer interaction. For the last twenty years I’ve split my focus between working as a practitioner and an academic in design. My academic work has culminated in doctoral studies at Aalto University in Helsinki.

Session Title

Digitally Occupied: Alienation, Autonomy and Resilience

Session Details

This session will cover the learnings from a number of years research into digital workers’ occupational experience. Findings from a four-week diary study, using online data collection and a variety of elicitation methods will be presented in detail. The data points to a need to extend Wilcock’s framework in order to account for the knowledge component, implicit to this type of work. Lastly, a number of tools and frameworks developed in the course of the overall research project to help build autonomy and resilience are presented. These tools were developed with the research cohort over a number of collaborative workshops but have never been presented or published so far.