Gillian Crampton-Smith

Having studied philosophy and history of art at Cambridge University, Gillian Crampton Smith spent the 1970s as a designer - first in book publishing, then on the Sunday Times and Times Literary Supplement.

In 1981, she designed and implemented a page layout program to help her with magazine design - an early desktop publishing application. This experience convinced her that artists and designers have an important role to play in creating information technologies.

After teaching at Central and St Martin’s, she joined the Royal College of Art in 1989, where she built the Computer Related Design programme, educating artists and designers to apply their traditional skills to interactive products and systems. Under her guidance, the CRD Research Studio achieved an international reputation as a leading centre for interaction design, supported by Interval Research Corporation of Palo Alto and a wide range of other industrial and government sponsors in Britain and overseas.

In 2001 she was invited to Ivrea (hometown of Olivetti) to set up Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, a graduate school and research institution sponsored by Telecom Italia and Olivetti. Interaction-Ivrea attracted students and teachers from all over the world and gained wide recognition as a leading centre for interaction design research and education.

After five years in Ivrea she and Philip Tabor moved to IUAV, Venice, to develop a graduate programme in interaction design at the university’s faculty of design. Here an ever-present challenge is to imagine how new technologies might be embedded gracefully in an historic and beautiful city such as Venice.

As well as collaborating in the development of teaching and research programmes with organisations in various countries, for seven years Gillian Crampton Smith spent her summers in Silicon Valley working first for Apple Computer and then for Interval Research.