Dr. Chris Elsden
Job title:
Lecturer in Design Futures
Role:
Co-Director and Cohort Lead for MSc Service Management and Design programme, EFI
Office:
1.51, Design Informatics, Bayes Centre
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkBiography
Dr Chris Elsden is a Lecturer in Design Futures. He is a design researcher, with a background in sociology, and expertise in the human experience of data-driven services and the cultural economy. Using and developing innovative design research methods, his work undertakes diverse, qualitative and often speculative engagements with participants to investigate emerging relationships with technology – particularly data-driven tools and financial technologies. In so doing, he hopes to reveal the many nuanced relationships people and organisations have with digital technologies in their everyday lives, and use these insights to identify new and future opportunities for design.
Recent major research projects and interests include: the interdisciplinary EPSRC Next Stage Centre DECaDE (£3.8m, Co-I), investigating the decentralised digital economy; and Children’s Digital Money Futures, in partnership with Natwest Group, undertaking participatory design research with children and young people to explore their contemporary experiences of digital money. In partnership with YoungScot, and the EFI Compassion in Financial Services Hub, he is developing further projects to support the co-design and research of youth-centred financial services.
Previously, Chris was a Chancellor’s Fellow in Service Design (2021 – 2026). He was also a Post-Doctoral Researcher on the AHRC Creative Informatics project, and the EPSRC OxChain project (2018 – 2021). His earlier doctoral research at Open Lab, Newcastle University considered the human implications of self-tracking tools as new ‘technologies of memory’, and outlined opportunities to design new forms of ‘documentary informatics’. He has published more than 50 research papers at leading HCI venues, as well as publishing in interdisciplinary journals (e.g. Big Data and Society, Journal of Cultural Economy) and edited collections.
Dr. Elsden is also Co-Director for the MSc in Service Management and Design, at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, where he teaches interdisciplinary courses in service design, co-creation and participatory methods, and welcomes inquiries from prospective MSc or PhD students.
Research interests
- Design Futures
- Financial Technologies
- Decentralised Technologies
- Cultural Economy
I teach extensively in the Edinburgh Futures Institute on the MSc Service Management and Design programme, where I also serve as a Programme Director and Cohort Lead. In addition to project supervision, I am course organiser for:
- Introduction to Service Management and Design
- Knowledge Integration and Project Planning
- Co-Creation, Facilitation and Workshops
I also contribute to courses on Value and Value Creation, and Designing and Delivering Public Services.
Research
Research
Recent major research projects include: the interdisciplinary EPSRC Next Stage Centre DECaDE (£3.8m, Co-I), investigating the decentralised digital economy; and Children’s Digital Money Futures, in partnership with Natwest Group, undertaking participatory design research with children and young people to explore their contemporary experiences of digital money. In partnership with YoungScot, and the EFI Compassion in Financial Services Hub, I am currently developing further projects to support the co-design and research of youth-centred financial services.
Recent key publications include:
Shaping Young People’s Financial Futures Together (Report)
Chris Elsden, Tina Harrison. Compassion in Financial Services Hub.
https://youngscot.net/ysobservatory/shaping-young-peoples-financial-futures-together
Interrogating the ORA framework: implications of tokenized licensing in the cultural economy. Frances Liddell, Chris Elsden, Ella Tallyn, Caterina Moruzzi, Evan Morgan, Billy Dixon. (2026) Journal of Cultural Economy, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2025.2589818
ORAgen Fables: Advancing the Design and Management of Content Attribution. Frances Liddell, Billy Dixon, Ella Tallyn, Caterina Moruzzi, Evan Morgan, and Chris Elsden. 2026. . In Proc. of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791227
The Secret Lives of Children’s Money: Exploring Children’s Financial Interactions in Transitions from Cash to Digital Monies. Valentina Andries, Cara Wilson, Harvey Everson, Caroline McKinley, and Chris Elsden. 2025. In Proc. Interaction Design and Children (IDC '25). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3713043.3728852
--
PhD Supervision Topics
- Design Futures
- FinTech
- Service Design
- Cultural Economy
- Creative Informatics
- Decentralised Technologies