Stuart Hallifax

Stuart was born in the UK, moved to France when he was 10 years old, and lived there for 19 years before coming to Canada. During his PhD Stuart had the opportunity to meet Dr. Lennart Nacke at a conference in 2018 during his course on Gamification. He then visited during the summer of 2019 on a research internship which translated into a full post-doc position that began in September of 2021.

Stuart’s PhD focused on how adapting gamification to specific learners can make systems more motivating and engaging. During his postdoc, he is building on this work to investigate how such a process can be adapted for use in contexts surrounding eye-health in young children. Stuart explains that this is important because people like many different things. We want to make tools and devices interesting, motivating, and engaging, and an effective way of doing this is integrating games. However, what works for one person might not work for someone else. Stuart wants to provide users with the best possible experiences, and designers with the tools to better understand how they can create systems that users want to interact with.