About

How can we live well with new and emerging technologies?

Using approaches from across the SHAPE (Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines), STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and Health disciplines, the Digital Futures Institute helps create better digital futures. Situated where SHAPE, STEM and Health converge, the Institute advances research and public understanding of the contexts, consequences and possibilities of technology by reframing what are usually thought of as technical challenges - to be solved through technical fixes - as human and social challenges that require other ways of knowing, making and responding.

The Institute reconsiders the relationship between the individual and technology (understanding ‘technology’ in the broadest sense) in society, culture and everyday life and draws on a wide range of research expertise across King’s, forging radically interdisciplinary solutions to society’s big problems. The work of the Institute is enacted across four centres: the Centre for Attention Studies, the Centre for Digital Culture; the Centre for Data Futures and the Centre for Technology and the Body.

Through our fellowships, projects and activities we explore questions such as:

How can we ensure the practice of coding and technological build is rooted in understandings of diversity, discrimination, culture and ethics, rather than having these issues addressed as an afterthought?
How can we ensure that new technologies are integrated into our lives in ways that promote equity and inclusion, working with, rather than against, fundamental human needs?
How can we empower individuals and communities through greater awareness (and self-awareness) to shape the development and use of technologies in their lives?
How might technologies be configured, rethought and repurposed to address simultaneous and overlapping global crises of public health, political trust, social inequalities and ecological breakdown?
How can we learn from a history of the reception and integration of new technologies to better confront the challenges of today?
Overall, the Institute addresses a fundamental question that has become urgent in recent years: how do we ensure that human needs, and human good, are prioritised in the development and implementation of technology?

Professor Marion Thain

Chair-Director, Digital Futures Institute
Professor Steven Connor

Director of Research, Digital Futures Institute
Dr Michael Marcinkowski

Director of Education, Digital Futures Institute
Professor Joanna Zylinska

Interim Director, Centre for Attention Studies
Dr Jonathan W. Y. Gray

Director, Centre for Digital Culture
Professor Fay Bound Alberti

Director, Centre for Technology and the Body
Professor Sylvie Delacroix

Director of the Centre for Data Futures
Dr Arianna Ciula

Director, King's Digital Lab
Professor Alice Taylor

Vice-Dean (Research), Faculty of Arts & Humanities
Professor Sir Simon Wessely

Regius Professor of Psychiatry
Charlotte Masson

Institute Manager, Digital Futures Institute
Ms Zeneath Simon

Institute/Research Administrator, Digital Futures & Global Cultures Institutes

Advisory Council

Dr Marcus Weldon

Chair of the Digital Futures Institute Advisory Council

Steering Committee

Professor Carmine Pariante

Professor of Biological Psychiatry
Professor Paul Luff

Professor in Organisations and Technology
Professor Luca Viganò

Vice-Dean (Enterprise and Engagement) and Head of Cybersecurity Group
Dr Zahratu Shabrina

Lecturer in Geographic Data Science
Alison Duthie

Director, Programming
Professor Nicolas S Holliman

Director of CUSP London
Professor Richard Wingate

Professor of Developmental Neurobiology
Professor Bobby Duffy

Director
Dr Zahratu Shabrina

Lecturer in Geographic Data Science
Nick Leake

Chief Information Officer
Professor Carmine Ventre

Interim Head of the Department of Informatics
Dr Flora Smyth Zahra

Clinical Senior Lecturer in Interdisciplinarity & Innovation Dental Education
Professor Dame Anne Marie Rafferty

Professor of Nursing Policy