DanFS (Daniel Foster-Smith)
I recently graduate from Designing Interactions at the Royal College of Art. Before this I was working for five years on a full time and then part time basis for a marine environmental consultancy specialising in mapping the distribution of biota on the sea floor. I then worked for one year full time for an economic software consultancy.

For the marine environmental consultancy (Envision) I was involved with collecting and analyzing survey data (acoustic and video) and setting up and running of the equipment on survey vessels. I also developed a networking system for transmitting sidescan data over long cables so that the sidescan could be deployed close to the sea floor in deep water. I also processed the survey data, producing high definition bathymetry of the sea floor and interpreting the data as predictive distribution maps of biota for clients.

I developed a number of decision support applications and spatial applications predicting the likely sensitivity and impact of different fishing activities for the Countryside Council for Wales in collaboration with Liverpool University. The aim of the application is to enable the process of regulating and proposing fishing zones to be based on the best interpretation of patchy and sparse information. I also worked on applications for Envision that developed intelligent null models for species distributions on the sea floor based on regional species pools and species' responses to physical disturbance of the sediment.

During my employment at the economic company (Gavurin) I was responsible for designing and developing a Flex front-end to a data browsing web application. The application allows you look at data geographically through time and compare and contrast multiple data sources, group data by location and drill down through different data structures, among other things.

I was drawn to the Design Interactions course at the RCA because of its critical approach to designing futures and the cross disciplinary method to exploring design/technology and its impact in society.

One of the interests I have is looking at the human decision-making process. What factors affect our ability to assess risk and probability when making a decisions based on multiple sources? I believe this is especially important as we find ourselves surrounded by and wanting more information when the key is actually developing more intelligent ways to make rapid and responsive predictions about the environment from the information we have.

As a development of the above ideas, I am interested in ways in which people can update their beliefs based on the outputs from predictive modelling and encourage them to ask ever more intelligent questions that can be formally tested. I think that this process of updating knowledge and beliefs requires new and creative ways of presenting information, one of my reasons for enrolling on the MA course.