I’m a doctoral candidate at the University of Cape Town, specialising in Mobile Interaction Design Research.

Dissertation

My dissertation is on co-located mobile interaction. More specifically, my research focusses on how we design sharing functionality for hyper-localised communication technologies, such as Cloudlets, and aims to investigate how users conceptualise co-located mobile interactions. Through the use of identity-management theories, such as Goffman’s self-presentation, I aim investigate how sharing concepts, such as group management, privacy and content ownership, and co-located concepts, such as proxemics, shape the way we design for sharing opportunities when we come together with our mobile devices.

Publications

• Thomas Reitmaier, Pierre Benz, and Gary Marsden. (2013). “Designing and Theorizing Co-Located Interactions.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 381–390. New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/2470654.2470709

• Pierre Benz, Edwin Blake. (2015). “Sharing the Cloudlet: Impression Management and Designing for Co-located Mobile Sharing.” Information Technologies & International Development, 11(4), 1-16. link