Designer HCI Researcher
Open to PhD positionsUnderstanding how people
and intelligent systems
work together.
I use design as a method of inquiry into how people understand, coordinate with, and adapt alongside intelligent systems. Drawing on cognitive psychology, human factors and design engineering, I explore these relationships through iterative designing and development of models, prototypes, and simulations.
Explore my research
I spent the last eight years as a UX Designer and Product Manager leading digital products and services across financial services, healthcare, and enterprise software. Along the way, I co-founded Spire, a UX research and product testing startup, and raised $100k in pre-seed funding. I also helped lead early-stage growth at startups in Nigeria, the US, and the UK, collectively contributing to over $7.5m in venture capital backing. My work was recognised through the UK’s Global Talent route, with endorsement as an Exceptional Talent in Digital Technology.
My time in industry gave me opportunities to build, lead, and see how design shapes people’s everyday experiences. It also left me curious, and with questions I wanted more time and deeper knowledge to explore.
In August 2026, I completed my MSc in Safety & Human Factors in Aviation at Cranfield University, where I developed FLIDIS for my research project, supervised by Dr James Blundell and mentored by Dr Wen-Chin Li. My experience at Cranfield renewed my enthusiasm for research and gave me a clearer ambition of becoming an experimental scientist.
I believe design and design thinking offer an accessible way to explore the future of collaboration between humans and intelligent systems. Making an idea or concept tangible provides something to experience, question, and shape. Through Research through Design (RtD), I want to bring that openness together with rigorous experimentation in developing knowledge about how people and intelligent systems can work together.
I’m currently open to research associate and doctoral positions.
How does coordination between people and intelligent systems develop, break down, and recover?
I want to understand the factors that shape trust, judgement, and shared control between humans and intelligent systems. I’m particularly interested in going beyond isolated tasks to integrated workflows and system-wide contexts.
Through design and empirical inquiry, I aim to develop knowledge, models, evaluation tools, design systems, and test beds that support efficient and safe human–system integration of human-AI teams in complex and safety-criticaL systems.
How do people and intelligent agents develop patterns of coordination over time? I’m interested in trust, reliance, ownership, and the sharing of initiative and responsibility—including how AI participation changes collaboration between people.
How are tasks, capabilities, intentions, uncertainty, and shared work represented and understood? I’m interested in mental models and computational representations that help explain how people anticipate behaviour, interpret situations, and coordinate action.
How do attention, workload, expertise, and control change as people work with intelligent systems? I want to investigate when adaptation supports effective performance, when it conceals emerging difficulties, and what enables recovery.
Designing to understand.
Making to ask better questions.
I approach my curiosities using a Research through Design (RtD) process. I develop artefacts that make ideas about human–system relationships tangible and open to investigation. Making, studying, and revising them helps me question assumptions and discover possibilities.
These activities form a recurring cycle: what I learn through making, use, and reflection can reshape both the artefact and the research question. I aim to share reusable tools alongside design rationale, limitations, and insights that others can examine and build on.
Experimental infrastructure
A browser-based experimental environment for investigating how people manage concurrent tasks. FLIDIS combines continuous manual control with multimodal secondary tasks, bringing together control measures, interaction events, and participant reports to examine task interference and behavioural strategies.
Inquiry through design: Configurable tasks and modalities make alternative interaction arrangements tangible and comparable, creating a way to investigate how design choices shape concurrent activity.
Public release in preparation
ICMI 2026 / Accepted demonstration / To be published
28th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction · Napoli, Italy · October 2026
DOI assigned: 10.1145/3776574.3832527 · Publication pending
HCII 2026 / Student Design Competition
28th HCI International Conference · Montréal, Canada · July 2026
A presentation and hands-on introduction to FLIDIS as an environment for investigating flight deck interaction.
Open research toolkit
Measuring visual attention in context. AREA aligns gaze with task events from AR headsets and desktop eye trackers, with tools for heatmaps, fixation measures, and areas-of-interest analysis to examine how attention unfolds during an activity.
Inquiry through design: Bringing gaze, task context, and analysis together creates a basis for exploring how choices about representing attention shape what researchers can observe and interpret.
Explore the projectAn airport ground-traffic simulation for studying automation trust and decision-making during conflict scenarios.
Proposed research question: How do automation reliability, conflict demands, and interaction history shape verification, decisions, and intervention?
Planned design exploration: Develop and iterate conflict scenarios and automation behaviours to make different conditions of human–automation coordination available for study.
A Multiple Resource Allocator and workload management layer for a simulated adaptive flight deck interface.
Proposed research question: When does automated resource allocation support human performance, and how does it affect awareness, control, and recovery?
Planned design exploration: Prototype alternative resource-allocation strategies and feedback arrangements, then use their behaviour and participants’ experiences to refine both the design and the research question.
Away from research, I make time for running, raising money for causes I care about, and sharing what I’ve learned with design and tech communities.
Running & fundraising
I took up running in 2025. It became a way to reset, challenge myself, and turn a personal goal into something that helps other people.
From evening races to half-marathon finish lines, I run to support heart research, HIV care, and children’s safety.
Speaking, community & mentorship
I’ve been part of design and tech communities throughout my career. I enjoy conversations that connect practice with new ideas, whether on a panel, in a workshop, or one-to-one.
I also mentor early-career designers and founders where I can. Sharing the lessons, questions, and occasional wrong turns is part of the work.
Invite me into the conversation
Professional communitiesRoyal Aeronautical Society · CIEHF · BCS
I’m interested in thoughtful collaborations across research, design, prototyping, and community work.
Tell me about the problem, who it matters to, and where you think I could contribute. A short outline is enough to start a conversation.
Paid projects, non-profit work, and pro bono proposals are welcome. We can work out the scope and fit together.
Prefer email?Open to PhD positions
I’d love to hear from potential supervisors and collaborators working on human–AI teaming, representation and sensemaking, human performance, and adaptation in complex systems.
hello@charlesnjoku.com
Based in the United Kingdom