Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, Victoria University

Dr Natasha Dwyer is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at Victoria University in Australia, where she coordinates the Bachelor of Creative Arts Industries. She is a design researcher exploring the dynamics of trust in digital environments, an area she worked in as Research Fellow at British Telecom. She is currently working on a project investigating how members of the Australian Samoan community perceive trust in the context of health advice. An outcome of the research will be short video messages to be screened in an exhibition. She recently published a book chapter describing how the signs of trust are a moving target and the implications of this for design and is currently working on a paper evaluating designs that attempt to ‘trust enable’ their users.

For ten years she worked as a public servant in the capacity of ‘Interactive Designer’ for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), a cultural institution at Federation Square, Melbourne. Her role was to facilitate public access to ACMI’s collections. Projects she designed included the Memory Grid (2003), a touch-screen interface that provided video-on-demand service to ACMI’s visitors. The work was available across multiple access points on ACMI’s ground floor for five years. The MAP (memory and place) project (2007) invited visitors to submit films about locations in Victoria to an interactive map.

Natasha has also been involved in the not-for-profit arts organization bigHart (www.bighart.org.au). In this capacity she created interactive documentaries to support television programmes broadcast on Australian national television. One work explored some of the reasons why young people are homeless and another work explored the high number of young men dying in car accidents in a remote area of Australia. Funding from organisations such as the Australia Council and the Australian Broadcasting Commission supported this work.