News Eminent scholar at City calls on public relations practitioners to seek out new opportunities in digital technology
| 10 December 2012
Vigilance can report that Dr Sara Jones, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Informatics and programme director for the Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership (MICL), has called on the public relations industry to take advantage of a number of emerging areas in technology to maximise creativity.
Dr Jones made this call in the respected Creativity in PR report co-authored by the Holmes Report and creativity consultancy Now Go Create in association with global public relations agency, Ketchum. The report is based on a survey of 650 public relations professionals from more than 35 countries.
Dr Jones said: "The results of the survey offer a fascinating snapshot of an industry struggling to find opportunities for creativity in a climate of severe constraints. To overcome these constraints and develop an appropriate climate in which creativity can flourish, the [public relations] industry will need to address not only the issues around recruitment, training and incentivisation but also look to new opportunities such as those arising from recent developments in technology. Social media, crowd-sourcing, serious games, affective computing and the use of big data visualisations all offer an abundance of exciting opportunities that are there for the taking."
Dr Jones was invited to contribute to the report in her capacity as programme director of the MICL by Claire Bridges, the report's co-author and founder of Now Go Create
About Dr Sara Jones
Dr Jones is currently a Senior Lecturer with interests in creativity and the design of interactive systems. Current projects include investigation of information spaces for creative conversations, MIRROR and Creative Stickies. She has recently worked on the exploration of the use of new technologies in museums and art galleries, networked devices for collaborative creativity, APOSDLE,VANTAGE, SeCSE, NATS-EASM and RESCUE-DMAN projects and also acts as process manager for RESCUE, a multi-disciplinary requirements process, involving the use of creative design workshops, for use in the development of complex socio-technical systems, such as those used in the domain of air traffic management. She has been working in the fields of human-computer interaction and requirements engineering since 1987, and has published over 70 academic papers in conferences and journals in these areas. Sara has taught a wide range of different courses in related areas, and has supervised five PhDs. She currently teaches creativity in interactive system design for both the Masters in Human-Centred Systems and the Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership. Sara will be on the organisation committee for DESIRE'11, the Second International Conference on Creativity and Innovation in Design, has been on the programme committee for REFSQinternational requirements workshops since 2004, and for various other conferences and workshops in the fields of requirements engineering, human-computer interaction and creative design. She has also acted in a consultancy role for North Thames Regional Health Authority and Xerox Welwyn Software Centre.
Contact details
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Phone: +44 (0)20 7040 8427
Room: A204 College building
Position: Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for the Masters in Innovation Creativity and Leadership