UX-UI & learning-experience design
Ph.D. in technology-enhanced learning
Hi, I am Aekaterini Mavri, a full-time member of the special teaching staff at the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts, co-director at the Cyprus Interaction Lab, at the Cyprus University of Technology and a fellow researcher at the EdMedia Group at the CYENS Centre of Excellence.
I hold a BA in Visual Communication Design, an MA in Design for Interactive Media – both from Middlesex University (UK) – and a Ph.D. in technology-enhanced learning from the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT).
Before joining CUT, I worked as an interactive product designer and project manager in the web development industry for several years. This relates to my current teaching activities at CUT which focus on web design and development (under and postgraduate levels), digital design, user experience design, inclusive design, and project management for multimedia projects.
My research interests span the areas of User Experience and User Interface (UX-UI) design, Learning Experience (LX) Design, and co-design for formal and informal education, making contexts, academic digital libraries, and e-banking applications. Ι also focus on the design and evaluation of technology-supported social learning models, with a focus on effective university-industry collaborations that can foster the development of students’ key 21-st century skills and pre-professional identities. I am also the initiator and coordinator of the CUT-IXN Industry Exchange Network (IXN) program, following the UCL IXN framework, by the University College London (UCL) (https://www.cut.ac.cy/cut-ixn/?languageId=1).
My doctoral dissertation, titled “Cross-organizational Communities Of Practice In Design Studies: Enhancing Creativity, Collaboration And Pre-professional Identities In Higher Education”, concerns the design, enactment, and evaluation of cross-organizational (industry-academia) communities of practice (CoPs), integrated into higher education Design studies, in an aim to cultivate skills such as creativity, communication, and collaboration, as well as the development of real-world practice relevance, and pre-professional graduate identities. The resulting CoP model and respective guidelines for interested researchers, educators and practitioners with the same goals, are provided on this website.
I also participated in the European-funded project Assessmake 21 research project, which concerns “innovative digital solutions to assess 21st-century skills in makerspaces: schools & non-formal” under the Erasmus+ KA2 funding program and in the COST action CA15221 [WeReLaTe] which addresses the challenges of creating effective models towards cohesive teaching, learning, research and writing development. I am currently involved in co-writing proposals for funded projects that involve work on UX-UI and LXD.
My future research goals revolve around the theoretical and applied study of human factors in the design of digital and – particularly – smart products, as these evolve in the current technological landscape. I also aim to further explore university-industry collaborations through technologically-supported and inter-disciplinary models. I intend to test and validate the cross-organizational CoP model in various other Design disciplines and also investigate its potential in cross-cultural contexts.
publications
This section outlines research on social learning and user interface design and evaluation, which has been published in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings books.
teaching
This section includes a list of the autonomous teaching modules as a member of the special teaching staff at the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts at the Cyrus University of Technology.
the model
This section presents an integrable cross-organizational (university-industry) Communities of Practice (CoPs) model in higher education curricula, with an aim to cultivate 21st-century skills.