Contact:

Personal rhrharper@hotmail.co.uk  - Blog - Academic: r.harper@lancaster.ac.uk

I am a researcher and scientist who studies how new technologies shape us and how we in turn shape our technologies. I have written 20 books and collections and published over 240 scientific articles on topics ranging from the social impact and design of mobile phones, the future of family communication, to the latest incarnation of artificial intelligence. 

My latest book is: The Shape of Thought: reasoning in the age of AI

Prior books include: 

Skyping the family: interpersonal video communication and domestic life

Choice: the sciences of reason in the 21st century

Texture: human expression in the age of communications overload

The Myth of the Myth of the Paperless Office (with Abi Sellen)

I invent as well as publish, and have patents on a variety of new concepts including secure cloud-based interaction devices, mobile communication apps, wearable security systems and family life appliances. I regularly speak to the public, and to the research and business communities on all aspects of the Digital Society. 

By way of background, I have led research teams at Xerox and Microsoft, and became the UK’s first professor of socio-digital systems when I was the director of The Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey. I am currently Professor of Socio-Digital Systems at Lancaster, where I am also PI on the EPSRC Future Places Centre and  Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Material Social Futures.

When not researching for these, I also consult through Social Shaping Research, Ltd. I am a Fellow of the IEEE and of the Royal Society of Arts, and the ACM elected me a Fellow of its Academy in honour of leadership in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. I am a Visiting Professor in the College of Science at the University of Swansea, Wales.  

I live in Cambridge and in Kirkby Lonsdale, North Yorks, I am married and have three children, the last of whom is still at University. I have published one auto-fiction book, The Scent of a Pool (Pegasus)

About my books

My latest book is an exploration of how we understand, use and are shaped by AI tools and technologies. The Shape of Thought argues that current AI tools, while offering us plenty of benefits, also constrain what we could do with technology, limiting us to what current machine learning processes can do, and encouraging us to think of our intelligence narrowly, in terms of that AI. The book offers ways forward that will allow us ti shape our thoughts beyond the limits of AI and in ways where our cultural practices are enriched by technology rather than constrained or trapped by it.  

My other books  include the IEEE award winning  Myth of the Paperless Office (with Abi Sellen, MIT Press: 2003) The Financial Times said this was the “only book worth reading on office technology that year” (2003). 

My 2011 book Texture  looked at how the technologies of communication shapes how we express. Texture was the Association of Internet Researcher’s ‘book of the year’. 

Choice, examined everyday choice-making activities and considers these in light of scientific theories about the mechanics of the ‘mind’. 

Skyping the Family, an edited collection looking at how video connections are shaping the experience of domestic life. Essays on this and other topics can be found in my blog. 

Recent papers have looked at Wittgenstein and communications technology; at the use of AI in affecting people's actions on the web; the future of HCI in the age of AI; and futures thinking about AI.  These and some sample chapters from these books can be found on the linked pages to the left). 

My public engagements reflect the diversity of my publications. I have addressed the Scottish Parliament on culture and technology; lectured at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, on philosophy and society, and explored the social impact of mobile phones at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. I have spoken alongside the Second Sea Lord on how to design for ‘digital warriors’ at RUSSI, Whitehall, and ‘conversed’ on the subject of time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. As we move into an era of AI, the relationship between our technologies and our sense of self is something I have spoken on in the unlikely setting of Disneyworld, Florida.