Keynotes
Yuriko Saito
Yuriko Saito, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the Rhode Island School of Design, USA, and Editor of Contemporary Aesthetics, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal. Her research areas are everyday aesthetics, Japanese aesthetics, and environmental aesthetics. She has lectured widely on these subjects, both within the United States and globally, and her writings have been published as book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries. She also published Everyday Aesthetics (2008, Oxford University Press) and Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (2017, Oxford University Press, awarded the 2018 Outstanding Monograph Prize by the American Society for Aesthetics), and Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life (2022, Bloomsbury).
Matthew Harrison
Matthew Harrison is the Head of Design at Imperial College’s Helix Centre, a design team situated in a major London teaching hospital. Within this role, he leads the Human Centred Design work in the UK Dementia Research Institute Care Research & Technology Centre. The centre aims to use smart-home technologies to support people living with dementia, and learn more about the disease and its impact on quality of life. Matthew’s mission in this role is to ensure the technologies we develop fit the needs and aspirations of the people we are designing for; people with, and affected by dementia, and the professionals that support them.
Matthew has an engineering and industrial design education, and a career built around inclusive design and Human Centred Design in research settings at the Helen Hamlyn Centre, Royal College of Art, and 10+ years at Helix Centre. His experience includes design of end-of-life care, paediatric medication, patient experience, and dementia.