Professor Martin Tomitsch is a Professor in the Design Lab at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, and Director of Innovation at the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education). He teaches design thinking and interaction design in the Bachelor of Design Computing, Master of Interaction Design and Electronic Arts, Major in Design, and "Inventing the Future" innovation programs.
Martin is the coordinator of the Urban Interfaces group and a member of the Smart Urbanism Lab. His research focuses on the interaction between people and new technologies. The academic field is known as “interaction design”; the application of this knowledge in industry is referred to as “user experience design”. Within the broad field of interaction design, his research investigates how new technologies can improve liveability in smart cities – for example, by using data to enable citizens to make better-informed decisions, addressing sustainability challenges through design, making cities safer for pedestrians, and creating digital tools for engaging communities. His research is underpinned by human-centred design and interrogates speculative futures through design.
Research projects that Martin has worked on range from media facade installations and large-scale urban screens to mobile interfaces and mixed reality environments. His current research focus includes: Investigating new interfaces to improve the safety of autonomous vehicles in shared environments, and identifying new participatory design methods that allow designers to consider natural systems in the design process. His recent books include Design Think Make Break Repeat (published by BIS), which is a handbook of design methods, and Making Cities Smarter (published by jovis), which introduces user-experience design principles to smart cities.
Martin holds adjunct positions at the Vienna University of Technology and the Beijing CAFA Visual Art Innovation Institute, where he is a visiting Professor in Media Architecture. He is founding member of the Media Architecture Institute and the Austrian Network for Information and Communication Technologies for Development , and NSW state co-chair for the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of the Human Factors & Ergonomics Society of Australia (HFESA). He actively contributes to the field as committee member and reviewer for many conferences and journals, including his roles as general chair for the Media Architecture Biennale (MAB) 2016, general chair for the Australian conference on Human-Computer Interaction (OzCHI) 2020, and subcommittee chair for the Designing Interactive Systems conference (DIS) 2021.
Prior to commencing his position at the University of Sydney, Martin worked as interface designer in large software and IT projects. He holds a PhD in informatics with a specialisation in interaction design from the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien).
