Senior Research Associate

Academic Division: Mechanics, Materials and Design

Telephone: +44 1223 3 32826

Email: sdw32@eng.cam.ac.uk

Research interests

• Analysing population statistics and creating design tools that enable practising designers to make products that offer a better user experience across a wider range of users.
• Understanding the extent to which the results from a small set of user trials capture the true diversity of capability evident within a national population.
• Using variable levels of impairment simulation to measure the demands that particular tasks place on user abilities, which enables a prediction of the corresponding exclusion.

Biography

• MEng (Hons), Mechanical Engineering, UMIST (now University of Manchester), 2002;
• PhD, Structural Engineering, Cambridge University, 2006;

Sam Waller is a researcher within the Inclusive Design Group at the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre. Sam championed the Inclusive Design Toolkit website, together with a website for e-commerce image recommendations, Vision and Hearing Impairment Simulator software , Cambridge Simulation Gloves and Cambridge Simulation Glasses.

Sam has developed web applications for calculating the number of people who would be unable to use a product or service. The Exclusion calculator  assesses tasks against a broad range of user capabilities, and SEE-IT is developed specifically for assessing the visual clarity of text or graphics that are handheld.